Cincom Eloquence is a B2B enterprise-level customer communications management (CCM) solution. It is used to design and deliver communications, either in bulk or on demand. Most of the customers are insurance and financial services orgs in the US and Europe. There are three main components of the application: Author, Administration, and Interactive.
Eloquence Author
Author is used to create templates for communication. These templates include complex logic and placeholder variables that are replaced with customer data later in the communication generation process.
My Role
Projects
Lead UX designer for the Eloquence product line.
I work on a team of 2-3 full-time UX designers and 1-2 interns. I collaborate with the Eloquence Product Manager, developers, and other stakeholders
I work on a team of 2-3 full-time UX designers and 1-2 interns. I collaborate with the Eloquence Product Manager, developers, and other stakeholders
AI Documentation Chatbot – designed, ready to train/implement
Author Approval redesign – implemented
Expression builder code editor – implemented
Filter and toolbar enhancements – implemented
AUTHOR APPROVAL CASE STUDY
Persona
Authors are business users who design communication templates for formats including print, email, and SMS. Authors include reusable components, variables, and logic flows in their templates so that their designs are as flexible and efficient as possible.
Use Case
An Author works for a mortgage servicing organization that serves multiple clients. They are designing a single template with slightly different content for different states in the US, to comply with state regulations. In their template, they add a multiple-choice rule with an option for each of the states that their clients service. A manager must approve the template for each of these states.
User Research
Through generative interviews with 6 Authors, we learned the existing Author Approval feature was underutilized. 3 users said they had tried to set up Approval but it was too complicated to configure and difficult to use. Author teams are generally small groups, and because the approval workflow is too cumbersome to set up, they opt to manage approval informally rather than in-app.
One customer was using Author Approval, and we collected their feedback. We also relied on customer support tickets and enhancement requests related to the feature. Although these requests were older, the approval workflow hadn't changed, so they were a valuable source of data.
Strategy
Author approval was underutilized because it was hard to use. Users had found workarounds, so the feature was not our highest priority. But in terms of future strategy, Cincom hoped to land more partners who would have a greater need for an approval workflow they could offer to their clients.
In addition, UX could re-use the improved patterns we designed in Author Approval for the more heavily used Interactive Approval workflow. We could use Author Approval to thoroughly develop and test the workflow and UI, then use our design in Interactive with greater confidence.
Problem Statement
How might we design a more intuitive approval workflow?
UX Analysis
Although Authors didn’t have a lot of first-hand experience with the approval workflow, we had feedback from another persona on a similar approval flow. Interactive end-users and managers reported frustration with their approval process. This workflow takes place before generated communication is sent to policyholders or clients. Pain points included:
- Uncertainty about the steps of the overall workflow and the current step
- Confusion caused by approval documents appearing in lists that didn’t make sense
- Alerts that didn’t have significant meaning or value
Through UX testing and analysis and conversations with stakeholders, we confirmed the confusing functionality and brainstormed designs with best practices in place.
Author Approval – Design
An Author Approval package can have many parts. For example, given the use case above, a package may include a different version of the communication for 30 different states. And each version may have an email and a printed document. A reviewer could leave comments on any of these versions, and on the package. Then a second reviewer would repeat the process. The UI needed to be crystal-clear so that reviewers didn’t get confused. During the initial design process, we completed multiple rounds of usability testing and iteration.
We also wanted this application to be responsive and mobile-friendly, so we created screens for medium and small breakpoints.
Medium Breakpoint
Small Breakpoint
While I worked on the review workflow and screens, a UX intern worked on the approval configuration process, which was another pain point. For this, we relied on user feedback and best practices to better represent the sequence of events and improve navigation.
Usability Testing
In one of our usability tests, we wanted to see if inline action buttons or a fixed button bar beneath the communication preview was more intuitive. We recruited two groups of six people on UserTesting for a balanced comparison study to test our prototypes.
Findings
Testers performed 5/5 tasks satisfactorily. Overall, there was a preference for inline action buttons, although both designs functioned well. Testers had additional valuable suggestions and behaviors we observed:
- We could reduce clicks by using a hyperlink rather than checkbox + action button
- Users expected review items to be collapsible
- Users looked for more validation from the system on completing a task
Wrap-up
Once we had a validated design for Author Approval, there were many behaviors that still needed to be decided and communicated to engineering. We included enhancements addressing user feedback from Interactive Approval:
- Added audit information detailing the whole review workflow and the current step
- Included past comments contextually within that audit information, so reviewers have more information in one place
- Added save/edit buttons to the comment boxes so that comments are more stable
Details details...
One of the goals of this project was to work with Engineering on UI, using our design system. This was the first time Engineering interacted with the design system, and our first time collaborating on UI in great detail. The UX policy was not pixel-perfect layout, but we wanted consistency in the implemented designs. There were several rounds of iteration with engineering, as we ironed out the details. Because we took our time with Author Approval, we were much more efficient with redesigning similar interfaces.
Challenges
In B2B it can be hard to access users, for a variety of reasons. In this case, we were working on a feature that most users abandoned. We knew there were usability issues, but we had to discover them ourselves and in secondary research with Cincom services and support. This method of user experience research is not ideal because it doesn’t come directly from users. But we relied on adjacent user feedback on similar patterns in the application and UX best practices to validate and create a smooth workflow.
