Speaking of ineffective business process that need to get revisited, I deal with a process every day at work that slows my efficiency down. Many times, business processes should help the process speed up and allow for a better use of customer’s time within an organization. It’s important to create a business process to find the parts that are working or not working, and need to be re-visited. After taking a deeper look into processes over the past week, I realized that I’m using an awful processes in my day-to-day at my workplace that can be fixed or recreated for more efficient work. QVC has an in-depth process system when it comes to the flow within the organization. Many teams have a process similar to mine, which is a lot of back and forth steps that aren’t necessarily needed. Some teams even have it harder than me because they have to get every single player involved in this process to have a say in moving on to the next step. Luckily for me, as you can see below, I only pass the process along to two other people. In this article, I wanted to share my thoughts on how we can better this process to make it faster and easier for both teams.

Step 1: This is the initial screen at the start of the request-

As you can see, there is nowhere to search for a specific document number (every request has their own number where you can go back and see the request). If I went right to this screen, I would have to go back to an email that was sent to me with the number in it.

Step 2: Fill in information-

This is an automated process, and the information isn’t always correct, making it extremely difficult to move past even the first set of information.

Step 3: Route to the first person in the process-

The designer gets first pass on the request. They design what they think is best and then route the piece of art to legal, copy, social review, etc. Every time a change gets made within the system, an email is sent out with a notification. The email doesn’t automatically take you to this page either, it takes you to the first step, where it’s difficult to even find the document you’re looking for.

Suggestions: The process flow should be similar to the below, but in this case we seem to be stuck between input, process, and output for a long period of time, and taken off of the system in between.

So here is where both usability and business process combine. This tool that we use every day at my job is not user friendly as it does not meet the exact needs of the customer in an efficient way. User experiences are supposed to be enjoyable, and the customer should love to experience the system in which they are in. In this case, however, this system is difficult to use and provides a lot of extra steps that should have to be included in the process.

By looking at the 5 key components, I could easily say that this website does not score high on the usability components:

• Learnability: Yes, it is easy to learn once you know how to access it.
• Efficiency: It is quite difficult to perform tasks. It automatically fills in the wrong information, and doesn’t load properly most times.
• Memorability: It is easy to memorize.
• Errors: It’s very easy for an error to be made because the interface is not the easiest to use.
• Satisfaction: It’s not the most pleasing to use, as you can tell by the pictures above.

Sources:

https://www.nngroup.com/articles/definition-user-experience/

https://www.nngroup.com/articles/usability-101-introduction-to-usability/