A Case Study

2019

Guest Experience Management

CLIENT NAME: CARNIVAL CORPORATION

THE PROBLEM

A dashboard that was amidst development, was created for the Guest Experience Management team to monitor and report a myriad of data sets regarding cruise ships and their guests. The team was required to create several time consuming reports on the daily - and this platform would severely reduce the time taken by automating reports - and also allow members to quickly log and access data.
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At the time, the user count for the team on-shore was considerably low; and the user count for those on-ship was practically nonexistent. Upon first reviewal of the platform, the flow was a bit disjointed and not consistent throughout the different features. In addition, the insight of what future tools that would benefit the team and guests was lacking as well.

THE SOLUTION

User research, feedback and analysis were major missing factors in the platform's beginning stages - and a believed cause for the problems mentioned. A better understanding of the users' tasks was needed to properly translate it to a dashboard that does not interfere with their current way of doing things, without it.

A design review and critique of the existing features, in addition to: user interviews, usability testing, feature case studies and descriptive documentation lent to an increased user exposure and a better user flow.

MY ROLE

I was the sole, User Experience Engineer on this research & development team. I collaborated closely with front-end and back-end developers, users, and the product owner; and passed on my approved wireframes to the company's UI designer.

• MY TASKS INCLUDED:
  
• + DesignING and conductING research through field visits, user interviews, usability testing, and logs analysis
• + analysis and communication of said research findings to the team
• + usE OF my programming knowledge to translate code-based resources into user-friendly tools
• + examinATION OF THE existing products, critique, and then providING solutions
• + generating several forms of documentation, wireframes, medium-fidelity mockups, prototypes, and flow-diagrams
• + integration of user feedback while adhering to business requirements
• + and generally being an advocate of user empathy and understanding.
  (at times, if the UI designer was unavailable, I'd make visual design suggestions if required.)

Since I joined the team at a time when the project already had an existing design library and released versions that a few users would have been familiar with, not only did I have to quickly catch-up on a topic I had no knowledge of (cruise-lines), I also had to adapt and only make subtle changes when necessary.

These changes led to a necessary improvement on the user flow for persons who are highly knowledgeable of what happens behind the scenes. All with low cost of development time and effort.

I.E. I was successfully working within the limitations of an existing product (no "creative freedom").

MY TOOLS

The team was already using Figma, so I followed suit and used it for wireframes, mockups and prototypes. For documentation, I used Confluence, Google Docs & FlowMapp. For task management, I regularly used JIRA.
Not to mention, I was always seen with my notebook & pen around the office.

WHAT I LEARNT

I was reminded why I take the steps I do in a user-centered design, process. In this scenario, a lot of headway was made on this product, without taking into account user feedback nor user research. There was some research done on what tasks & reports are to be completed, which is great for making things accurate; but even with a dashboard that seemingly on paper would practically do their work for them - the client's team did not use it. Why?

After reviewing the product and hearing more from the persons who are manually doing a lot of things to maintain a great guest experience, it was no surprise as to why many did not initially make use of the dashboard. Through several interviews and witnessing first-hand what users need to do to complete their job well, and how they fill in the gaps without the use of the dashboard - I learnt that simply making a product that is technically sound or aesthetically pleasing is not nearly enough.

RESULTS!

We tracked the dashboard using Klipfolio.  The number of application users, positive user feedback and user response and interaction increased by 200%; and user frequency and duration will increase by approximately 45% on each new future release.