Ruby
Receptionists Operating System
Role: Art Direction, Research, Interaction, Visual & Motion Design
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Ruby provides live call answering services 24/7/365.
The Next Evolution of Call-handling System
Background
Ruby has used several different call-handling systems, from hardcopy lists of phone numbers to Telecall to ROS. ROS has served us well for many years, it allowed us to grow to where we are today. We certainly aren’t done growing yet, so as we look to the future, we also look to the next evolution of ROS to help get us there.
Opportunity
Streamlining Systems
To help receptionists focus on delivering excellent service to our customers and their callers.
Receptionist Pipeline
Reduce training time and increase pool of candidates.
Customer Self Service
Fielded instructions enables data to flow from customers to ROS.
New Product Offering
ROS for your business to increase customer longevity and reach new markets.
Redesign and evolve the Receptionists Operating System into a scalable user-friendly system.
Hypothesis
North Star
By creating a North Star concept we will examine new ideas for ROS that might otherwise seem impossible given the current, real world constraints. This exploration will help us be more creative in solving some of the problems we face with ROS today, as well as conceptualize new features and functionality.
Final ROS Redesign
The ROS redesign will reduce receptionist decision points, streamline Customer Service and Receptionist workflow, increase accuracy, and reduce training time.
The Process
In partnership with Product, the UX Director had hosted a workshop that brought together team members (stakeholders, leadership, and Receptionists) to describe the problems we need to solve and understand the people we are designing for by creating good day/bad day profiles and user stories about how Rubys currently work with ROS and what else they need to better provide the Ruby service.
Shortly after the ROS kickoff, we affinitized all the feedback, feature requests, UI issues, and user stories that had been collected so far, and we identified these major themes.
- Call handling instructions
- Table stakes functionality
- Integrations with Ruby systems
- Intuitive layout
- Status
- Visual communication
- Clear language
- Simple interactions
- Access to information
- Customized views
From there we defined our design criteria, as a team we use these broad ideas to evaluate our ideas against, to make sure we’re addressing the feedback from stakeholders and receptionists.
Design Criteria
Bare Minimums
Ensure that new ROS can do all the things you’d normally expect in modern software.
ROS IQ
ROS should show receptionists the information they need to know when they need to know it.
Serve both Rubys and Vets
ROS with an easy learning curve will help Nuby Rubys learn the job faster. ROS should also support Vet receptionists by ensuring that instructions can be consumed quickly to accommodate their masterful and speedy pace.
Streamline the Process
Workflows should be streamlined, logical, and allow receptionists to handle calls with the minimum number of steps. We should integrate other Ruby systems into ROS wherever possible.
Knowledge is Power
Easy access to information about our customers and callers will help us deliver an authentic in-house experience, be familiar, and make connections. Details of receptionist actions taken on each call will provide better coaching opportunities and visibility into what happened on a call.
Visual, Interaction, and Motion Design
Receptionists should know at a glance what to do or say next. Use visual, interaction, and motion design to guide receptionists through their tasks.
Bump In The Road
Due to priority changes in the roadmap, the UX team had to shift our focus away from the ROS Redesign.
We wanted to keep our momentum and still keep the ROS Redesign project in our radar; as part of “Rubyland” (Employee engagement event) we asked Rubys to sketch out their ideal ROS. We got a lot of confirmation about emerging themes we’d seen in our earlier data and got a few fresh ideas too!
After several months of pause, now with our plan in hand we are ready to dive back into ROS!
The Ideation Phase
We began our restart by analyzing and reviewing on what we had so far; the data, the emerging themes that we’ve gathered last year and some early design explorations by the team. With a refreshed knowledge and understanding, we went into ideating, coming up with as many concepts as we could and then collaborated with Receptionist Service leadership to understand which ones could meet the needs of Ruby from their perspective.
Validate
For this first round of testing, we felt the right approach is to use paper prototypes. We narrowed the scope but did not want to go too far until we talked with the users. We took six conceptual designs to receptionists for feedback and we learned a lot!
Design Sprints
After multiple iterations on the conceptual designs, we narrowed down our direction and started using Design Sprints to test our ideas by defining the problem, understanding the problem (lighting talks, how might we statements, sprint questions), broad ideation (lots of sketching), building a prototype in one day and gather user feedback the next following day.
Prototyping &
Usability Testing
At this stage, we’re using interactive prototypes to help our testing sessions by simulating a more real experience and generated valuable feedback. This phase involved several cycles of design using a medium-fidelity prototyping tool and user testing with receptionists. We decided that it’d be best to start with a prototype for the most basic call handling styles—transfer a call, take a message, or send the caller to voicemail—then gradually add in more complex workflows and further refinements. In order to collect as many insights as possible, we used moderated and unmoderated testing methods during this phase.
Early Design Explorations
During this phase, I led the team of 2 designers in designing and creating the prototypes with these key functionality to test with users at this first round of testing.
- Answer calls
- Try a customer’s line
- Transfer calls to customers
- Take messages from callers
- Send callers to voicemail
- View and relate important company information to callers (FAQs, company address, fax number, etc.)
Analysis & Synthesis
Collaborative design has been constant throughout our iterations as our goal is to improve ROS so that it makes sense and works well for everyone—Stakeholders, seasoned and new receptionists, and possibly in the future, as a product for our customers to use.
- On-site testing with 34 receptionists (nubys and vets)
- 10 leadership participants
- Concept feedback
- Interactive prototype with motion design
Key Insights
The learnings and findings from our first round of testing have helped drive and inform our design strategy and direction as we continued to refine and iterate the design.
More Analysis & Synthesis
So far, we have mapped out over 30 hours of video, audio and notes from our testing sessions and we were able to uncover and pull out a lot of themes to make meaningful design decisions moving forward.
Outcome
Access to Information
With the understanding of making ROS v2 useful and intuitive and most of all grounded in how receptionists work and what they need to get done; we’ve focused on the theme of bringing information forward.
Where in current ROS, a receptionist must navigate through multiple tabs and text to find what they need, we’ve focused on how we could display company information, employee status and profile instructions all at once to help receptionists sound more in-house and improve accuracy and speed on a call, and always be one step ahead of the caller.
Also we’re hoping that we can incorporate a smart search feature into ROS. We know this is an early stage of design, but we’re thinking about a search for employee and type of call directories as well as keywords that could help a receptionist during a call.
Within our new designs, we settled on a 3-paneled progressive disclosure type view. During our testing sessions, we received great feedback from receptionists being able to handle the call with almost no delay.
Dial Button
Guide Receptionists Through Their Tasks
We’ve also been using motion to help receptionists throughout call handling. Our intention with a dial button is to unconsciously make routing a call more intuitive. With this button, we’ve
factored in placement, user friendly language, and visual cues to prepare a receptionist to be one step ahead of the caller.
During our testing sessions, we received a lot of feedback on the direction. Receptionists like the idea of a motion dial button. This type of dial uses less space on the screen and should help a receptionist know:
- Which lines they have dialed
- Who they are talking to
- Indicators towards next steps
Visual Language
Crafting a Holistic Look and Feel
In conjunction to the ROS redesign, I also led the process of translating the Ruby brand guidelines into style guide and design standards for all Ruby’s digital products (customer-facing and internal-facing applications). This style guide contains colors, typography, components, buttons, and iconography.
Visual Explorations
Infusing Ruby Brand Traits
During our recent usability testing with receptionists, we heard some spontaneous comments that relate to the visual details of our wireframes. I led the charge in furthering and refining the visual styling on new ROS; how the visual design affects receptionists’ behavior and task success when interacting/using the program. Design decisions on font style, weight, size, spacing, alignment and color can significantly impact readability, scanning speed, comprehension and accuracy.
Not only do we want to create a usable experience; we have a lot to gain from effective branding, aesthetic choices and their impact on receptionists’ attitudes and to potentially help them stay in a Ruby mindset.
Next Phase
As we continue to refine the visual styles, add more functionality to the prototype and gather feedback; the next phase of ROS Redesign will be about how the design will be shaped and informed by moving it into code and pulling from real data sources. Also we will know more about our development strategy, once we make a clear infrastructure choice.
With all the learnings we’ve gathered, these are the insights that will drive our next design exploration and research:
Color Contrast
Exploration on different shades of white for the background and further testing with receptionists who are color blind.
Legibility
Larger font size on the out instructions and profile’s email address.
Focus
Exploration on using visual and motion to help direct the user’s attention/ focus to the greeting area. Exploration to increase the clarity of verify’s visual cue and the visual distinction for voicemail & messages.
