#Design thinking - buzzword?

Background.

With a long backgroud

In MLM, we always talk about "PASSIVE INCOME". Passive income is the money that you earn without doing much to make it. But how can you get that? After recruiting several layers of downlines, team leaders will coach them, giving them strategic instructions on promotion and ordering. All the sales generated from your downlines will be counted as the team leader's sales and that's how the team leader earn passive income from the sales of his whole team.

The dashboard includes:

• personal ordering bonus

• group ordering bonus

• team ordering bonus 

• recruitment

• team members' performance (team structure)

I was the lead UX/UI designer for the brand new business platform focusing on US/Canada market. Eventually, the business platform will replace all the other obsolete platforms in all oversea market (Hong Kong, Singapore, Malaysia, US, Canada, Karzakhstan, Thailand, Philippines...etc).

What am I asked to do.

• Improve the look and feel of the platform
   

• Align all the figures and their update time from different platforms
   

• be more user-centric on the design

What do I inherit.

The original one is only a excel-like IT system and displaying all the figures in disorganised way. User needs time to learn how to use it as it is not intuitive at all.

Research.

I need to understand how the team leaders view the dashboard and what insight they want to know from these figures.

• Conduct interviews with the distributors in Hong Kong, knowing their workaround towards the system
   

• Get requirements and comments from the marketing team from all existing local market
   

• looking at the usage figures of all digital platforms

I need to know where i can improve from the previous platform and the technical boundary for the new platform.

• Gather feedbacks on all the digital tools from local office and customer service
   

• Gather information from programmers and engineers on the api of the centralised bonus calculating system based in China

Research outcomes.

• The dashboard fails to gain the trust from distributors, they would choose to call the front desk to know their figures but actually that's the same result getting from the dashboard.
   

• dashboard is more for individual purpose, whether they can get enough points to earn the free travel opportunities, promotion opportunities, extra bonus
   

• 90% usage on the team structure function, mostly used by senior distributors and team leaders
   

• Senior distributors and team leaders need to expand the tree diagram one by one and checked each members performance
   

• They want to know which downline has potential to growth, which downline's membership is going to expired, which downline is going to leave their business...etc
   

• Because they may not directly know the downline, they will then contact their direct upline and teach them how  to follow up the case.

Other insight

• the bonus calculating system will have a 8 hour downtime at midnight (GMT+8) which cannot serve the Canada distributors in day-time
   

• the China IT team will gradually improve the update frequency 

How might we.

Create…
A smart notification and filtering system

For…
Senior Distributors 

To…
know which team members need to be followed up at ease

And improve…
the user experience, usefulness and the usage of the platform

Design.

Design is split into 3 parts.
data visualisation for the dashboard
add inbox
add follow up and search in team management

Impact / hindsight.

User satisfaction rate increase from 60 to 80
90% of user switch to the new platform (parellel with the old system)
inbox respond rate 75%