ComPASS: global collaboration, aligned direction
At a glance
Role: Experience Designer
Objective: Design a B2E2B platform for an international technical certifier.
Challenge:
- Empower collaboration across regional offices and test laboratories.
- Harmonise pipeline from order entry to certification to report.
- Raise project intake and hence effectiveness and competitiveness for the company.
Team set-up:
- 2 Experience Designers + 1 Visual Designer at denkwerk (on-site)
- In-house Product Owner + engineering teams (remote)
- Stakeholders: various Business Analysts, department representatives, and third party contractors
Major responsibilities:
- Contextualise user needs (as a team of 2 Experience Designers).
- Shape product requirements with PO.
- Develop concepts for the collaboration platform.
- Closely partner with software developers to support implementation.
- Found a design system with Visual Designer for digital products at TÜV Rheinland.
Tools:
- Miro
- Sketch, Zeplin
- Jira, Confluence
Problem
Collaborative work can be tough when you do not share the same vision… especially when you are 5,000+ altogether across the world!? 🌎🌍🌏
Status quo
TÜV Rheinland is a 145-year-old-and-growing certification service provider for all kinds of technical standards, ranging from 🧸 baby toys to 🚜 heavy machinery. It holds offices worldwide and works with test centres & laboratories across continents.
To guarantee quality and security, products are examined and tested comprehensively at TÜV, often at the best situations in different 👨🏻🔬 regional labs. Hence, delegation, coordination & management between divisions are crucial to their success and competitiveness.
But protocols and consensus do not always come naturally. Departments have developed their unique ways of work over time. A shared standard work tool along the international production becomes necessary to bring people and work together. 🙋🏾♀️🙋🏻♂️🙋🏼♀️🙋🏾♂️🙋🏻♀️🙋🏼♂️
Concept
That’s how ComPASS came to life! ComPASS is a workflow platform tailor-made for TÜV’s global business. It accompanies their various teams through their production process and 🧭 provide orientation to players on complex projects. From order placement & analysis, labour division & cooperation, to lab tests, reports & follow-ups—every pace is incorporated and taken care of on ComPASS.
Hands-on
As part of the UX/UI team, we met with their international business and technical departments to conduct 🔍 user research. By understanding, analysing and mapping their process, roles and journeys, we identified their bottlenecks & pain points, spotted necessary modifications & alignment, and discovered insights in how to digitise, innovate & reshape their global workflow, all and while attending to their jobs-to-be-done and needs. At the same time, we tried to tactically find the common ground for geographical work culture & habits. Through iterative design and development process, we gradually converted an ambitious idea with complexities into a flexible, scalable collaboration system which not only consolidates their business as a whole, but also tones in well with different team players across the board. ⛹🏻♀️⛹🏽♂️
We worked in an intercontinental dual-track agile team across seven locations: 🇯🇵 Yokohama, 🇭🇰 Hong Kong, 🇨🇳 Shanghai, 🇹🇼 Taipei, 🇬🇧 London, 🇩🇪 Nuremberg, and 🇩🇪 Cologne. Our major responsibility was design exploration and insight discovery. I also closely worked with developers in the project team to guarantee our concepts’ delivery and end product quality. Altogether we were building the ComPASS platform and simultaneously developing a design system for TÜV Rheinland for their other forthcoming digital products.
Result
Higher transparency along the global pipeline, better management & coordination of working teams, closer collaboration between business & technical departments—all towards a stronger service provision, catalysing customer satisfaction. 😄🧭
Courtesy: denkwerk, visual content.