Project Details

Length: 8 Months

My Role: Lead, Onsite UX Design

Platform: Desktop Web

Background

Portal Plus was a digital transformation project that I helped lead for the Financial Services division of Hewlett Packard Enterprise. This project's goal was to completely reimagine how their customers interacted with HPEFS, transforming an old operating model into an industry-leading customer experience.

To set some context, HPEFS is primarily in the business of selling large amounts of IT assets (think computers, printers, servers, etc) to other large companies on a long term, rental basis. This allows their customers to spread out their IT budget into monthly payments instead of in a single transaction. This frees up capital to be deployed into other areas of the company and allows big global enterprises to move quickly. Leasing through HPEFS also provides some accounting benefits as their services are typically considered an operating expense rather than a capital expenditure.

Research

In order to achieve this goal, we knew that we would need to start with research. We were fortunate enough to have the institutional buy-in to conduct 3 design thinking workshops, one in NYC, one in Dublin, and one over Zoom. During these workshops, we were able to gather together stakeholders from all across the world in order to conduct workflow mapping, create personas, analyze pain points, and even do some rough whiteboarding. This allowed us to fully understand the problem space we were working in and ensured that our solution would create actual value for our end users.

Iteration

After the workshop, we got to ideating. Our goal was to work collaboratively with HPEFS as much as possible to ensure that our prototype was solving user needs and there weren’t any big reveals at the end of the engagement. Our prototype went from pen and paper sketches, through to rough wireframes, and finally to a development ready prototype with annotations that any dev team would love.

Final Product

Overall I am very happy with how this project came together, and am excited to see it begin development! Our final deliverable included over 500 individual frames and was the product of countless previous iterations. This project is a great example of how a small group of 5 designers were able to bring a comprehensive web application all the way from an initial idea to a polished final product.