Customer Replacement tool - Application Website
Customer Replacement tool is a process that is utilized to resolve customer issues that Apple has not been able to resolve using the standard processes.
Problem
The business was using an external tool that was outdated, unsupported system infrastructure, unstable without any support or fixes. They couldn’t meet the customer needs on time.
Solution
To achieve a secured enterprise-level resolution to automate the process globally that provides customers with a finished good replacement whenever Apple's operations fail to resolve an issue.
My Role
Lead UX Designer
My Responsibilities
Gathering Business Requirements, creating paper and digital wireframing, low and high-fidelity prototyping, testing, accounting for accessibility, iterating on designs and responsive design
Duration
Sep 2019 – Dec 2019 (First phase)
Design Process
Define
The first step I usually take is to define the general business needs, requirements for the project, understand the deliverables, timeline and expectations. It's important to always stay on the same page with the rest of the team.
Discovery
During the initial discussions with the stakeholders, we found that the existing 3rd party tool was not helping the agents to do the replacement process. They had to navigate from their portal to Apple.com and create the requests. Also, this process required some manual intervention.
Often it is necessary for the user to separately open the AOS internal store to determine the part number of the product to be shipped to the customer.
The business wanted to automate the process and they also wanted to monitor the Order progression and Shipment updates.
Analysis
There are 4 scenarios used by our business partners to resolve these issues:
Receive Only - Receive the customer’s bad unit and appease them financially.
Appeasement - Do not ask for the bad unit to be delivered, but send a replacement unit to the customer free of charge.
Standard Replacement - Receive the customer’s bad unit and upon receipt, trigger the replacement order.
Advanced Replacement - Send a replacement to the customer prior to receiving the bad unit. Penalties result if the bad unit is not received.
Ideation
During the ideation phase, we came up with several ideas based on the feedback we received and one of these ideas paved our way to create a “Material Lookup Application” that will facilitate the proper material determination based on user selections, retrieve price, and availability of the product. This will be used in the appeasement models where a product is shipped to the customer free of charge to make the customer and give a whole new experience. We also created a dashboard to monitor the shipping status.
In scope was to find the closest match or upgrade the product when the agents don’t find the exact product to ship.
Few Design Previews
Accessibility Issues
As part of this project, we had to meet Apple’s AA+ Accessibility standards. I worked with IS&T CoE team. They are the Subject Matter Experts to help in the areas of web accessibility. As this was on the SAP portal, we had issues with iframes. Major issues were related to Voice over, keyboard users.
Few examples
Clear and Search buttons are inaccessible to VoiceOver users.
“Receive Only”, “Ship Only”, “Advance Exchange”, “Receive and Ship” in accessible for VoiceOver and keyboard-only users.
Donut chart inaccessible to VoiceOver and Keyboard only users.
Provide native button element
Provide hidden main heading(H1)
All interactive elements must be accessible using the keyboard only.
Buttons (All, complete, pending, error, canceled) must be exposed as a tab to VoiceOver
VoiceOver label must match the visual label
Almost all the major accessibility related issues were fixed and got signoff before the Go Live!
Key Takeaways
I worked with many teams and got great experience in creating a smooth interface. This project helped me to learn the importance of accessibility which led a way to learn more on this subject. Even though we had technical issues, I made sure that we fixed most of the UI issues before moving to production.