EPRI
Mobile Member Center
My team at EPRI was small, resources few and the capacity for applying solid UX principals challenging. These facts provided a great environment to test my resolve. Something the team had already created for EPRI's customers was a portal called the Member Center. This is a place members can go to access all the information they have purchased; product information, event details, company contacts, etc. It's built on Sharepoint and is pretty expansive yet rigid. What was lacking was a way to access all this information comfortably on a mobile device. Here are a few examples from the process of building the Mobile Member Center…
Whiteboard, Sketch & Process Flows
By surveying our members and sifting through metrics from the data we already had, we learned what information had the most traffic, and what members needed in the mobile app.
Once we decided on what we would offer in the MMC at launch we got to work at sketching the user flows and journey maps.
Interface sketches helped walk stakeholders and potential users through our initial ideas.
Above is a good example of the planning that went into the app structure along with the information architecture.
Wireframes & Early Prototyping
Once the main channels of information were decided upon, I started to create more specific and tighter flows in wireframe form.
Early on I built some quick simple prototypes to get team and stakeholder buy-in on design direction.
The initial intent was to start with a simple search field that would handle all inputs.
Due to API constraint per channel we had to go with the initial list view to then navigate to a specific channel.
invision Prototype & Live app
I experimented with various mobile app prototyping tools along the way; Proto.io and Pixate to name a few, but I decided on Invision to build the final prototype.
Invision was a good tool to allow the team, business and even testing members to benefit from various feedback and log changes throughout the design, testing and development process.
We developed the native app building on the Cordova framework to be able to deploy on Android and iOS using one code base.
The app was launched with rave reviews from our members, and quickly sparked a wave of requested enhancements to the core set of initial release features.