US Airways (now American Airlines) IVR
The first project I had the opportunity to lead, and still one of the deployments I'm most proud of for our team's collaboration, our ability to innovate, to design around user needs, and to create the industry's first predictive system.
The challenge
Develop a system for predicting caller's intents, and design it to best use that information to improve the experience.
The solution
Our repeat contact engine and flow.
User research and design thinking
Our Solution Performance Team analyzed over 100K calls and identified several intents with relatively high probabilities of repeat contact. We decided to focus on the 3 use cases where we felt we could most improve the user experience with respect to:
personalization
streamlining the interaction (fewer steps to completion/transfer)
increasing success - especially by minimizing difficult (e.g., alphanum) data collection
increasing trust in and perception of the system
Designing
In the designs, we really had to think about where to modify the existing flows to pull, use, and log information for our Repeat Contact Engine. We had to think about how to prompt users so that we would minimize disruptions and be easy for them to recover if we got their intent wrong. Our process was very iterative and a close collaboration between design and dev. The user experience drove every decision we made. In the end, our deliverables included:
User testing
Before we deployed, we did some usability testing and had an early indication that the solution would be well-received and that the system would feel more personal and intelligent.
After deployment, we were able to measure success more objectively, according to the metrics we had laid out for ourselves (fewer steps in the IVR, greater task completion).
System feedback during user testing - pre-deployment
Part of the usage and flow analysis - post-deployment
My roles and note
I used the word 'we' throughout this project description, because this work reflects a real commitment to design from everyone involved - business stakeholders on down.
My role was design lead. I created or oversaw all the deliverables (use cases, user flows, and prompts), led internal and external design reviews, led user testing, and worked closely with our solution performance team to define our questions and metrics of interest.