Spearheading the service request platform experience forUofT clients
Project background
I joined the University of Toronto’s Facilities & Services (F&S) team as a Lead Product Designer where I collaborated closely with project managers, developers, process analysts, and QA.
I gained insight into the market, clients, and user needs of the product to design an intuitive, easy-to-use service request experience. I owned the end-to-end user journey and all aspects of design execution from research, vision, ideation, prototyping, and user testing, to final production.
Below is a little snippet of the project!
Project overview
F&S clients are frustrated with the current service request platform.
A redesigned service request platform that addresses user needs and achieves business goals.
U of T Facilities & Services wanted a seamless, intuitive platform for clients to submit and track service requests, supporting its strategic goal of providing superior customer solutions. The platform needed to:
Context gathering
This project started with a lot of ambiguity. I was joining a new team in a complex domain, with unclear requirements and many stakeholders. To get my footing, I ran preliminary research on facilities management and talked with people across the different trades, from caretaking to HVAC to fire prevention, as well as clients and property managers, since I’d be working closely with them.
Research plan
At this point, my fellow designer and I still had a million questions running through our minds therefore, we held a whiteboard workshop to organize our questions as a guiding point for our user research.
As we were just scraping the surface, Jing had to leave the project. Moving forward, I took on the role of the sole lead designer, with support from the rest of my team.
Before diving deep into research, I established our research goals
Surveys
Participants were given a virtual survey form to fill out with qualitative and quantitative questions about the service request platform. I used the results from the survey to understand user behaviour and determine areas that need further in-depth understanding through user interviews and usability studies.
Highest F&S survey response rate to date!User interviews
Participants were asked a list of preliminary questions regarding the service request platform. The goal was to learn about their experience using the platform and how they’ve seen other team members use it.
Exploratory usability studies
Participants were given a series of tasks to complete through the current service request platform while thinking aloud throughout their experience.
We had an overwhelming amount of notes and observations from users. I led a virtual affinity mapping workshop with my team to place our findings into clustered themes. We analyzed our research and extracted key points based on the following key points and clusters. At the end of the workshop, I brainstormed a few 'How might we?" (HMW) questions from each cluster to use during our brainstorming ideation session with the rest of the team.
After synthesizing our research I developed our ideal user persona. This allowed us to ensure we understood our user and helped guide us in our ideation process by brainstorming through our target user’s perspective.
Say hello to Victor!
Ideation & design
Brainstorming potential solutions to HMW questions
To get all our ideas out on the table, I led a few ideation workshops with the rest of our team. While keeping Victor's needs at the forefront, we came up with ideas for each HMW question. We then voted based on each idea based on effort and impact - each team member got 3 votes per 1 HMW question.
Prioritizing ideas - trade offs
The ideas with the most votes were plotted on a prioritization grid, which sorted them into Home Runs, Big Bets, Quick Wins and Marginal Gains. We chose the Home Runs, highlighted in light blue, because they offered high impact and were relatively easy to build.
The trade-off was deferring bigger, more complex ideas to a later phase, since they needed more development time than the timeline allowed. For example, a communication history log was a high-impact Big Bet, but it needed too much effort for the first release. I aligned with the developers and stakeholders on this call, so the first release stayed focused instead of overreaching.
With the top solutions chosen, I sketched low-fidelity wireframes of the three key screens: the dashboard, the submission form and request tracking. I used them to align the team on structure before moving to higher fidelity.
Usability testing
It was time to test the navigation, groupings and designs with users. I used my mid-fidelity mockups to build a prototype for moderated testing. I see a usability test as a way to find problems with a design, not to validate it. Watching how users behaved let me fix issues early and build a more usable experience for the intended audience.
Tree testing
Using Optimal workshop, participants were instructed to find a certain item/ feature through a list of links also known as a navigation hierarchy.
Card sorting
Using Optimal workshop, participants were instructed to place service request details on a spectrum based on how important/highly used they think this detail would be to filter on the service request dashboard.
Moderated prototype testing
Participants were given a series of tasks to complete on the prototype while thinking aloud throughout their experience.
Final design
After several iterations, design critiques, and cross-functional meetings, I finalized the design to hand off to our developers to ship!
I created a handoff document that included interactions, edge cases, and other notes about the new service request platform.
Main dashboard
Create a new service request form
Users can submit a new service request through a simplified form that allows them to accurately submit all their relevant service request details.
Service request tracking + progress updates
Users can track the status of their service requests in real-time. The tracker consists of the latest status and prior updates, displayed in chronological order.
Users can choose to opt in to progress updates if they want to stay informed on any changes to their request.
Next steps
The design was handed off and set to go live in June 2024. Before I moved on from the F&S team, I worked with another designer to define how success would be measured, so the team could track results after launch.
Reflect & grow
Working cross-functionally
I worked closely with project managers, stakeholders, developers and content writers through frequent touch points. These conversations clarified business goals, showed me the key areas to improve, and shaped our copywriting strategy.
Communication is key
Designers need to communicate design intent clearly. I stayed vocal about my work, defended my design choices, and shared information widely, even beyond my immediate team. That built trust and helped move design artifacts into production.
Document everything
On a complex, ambiguous project, documentation became a valuable asset. It helped my team and me track decisions, align stakeholders on direction, and hand off with confidence.
Prioritize and focus
Choosing Home Runs over bigger ideas taught me to ship a focused first release and plan the rest for later.
If you're all the way down here already, thank you so much for taking the time out of your day to live this journey with me!