The Kick-Off
As part of ongoing platform work for DuPont, we were asked to produce an interactive tool to help users enter the sales process of looking for and selecting thermodynamic plastics for their industrial applications. The tool would need to be responsive and support multiple screen sizes, for use on phones by partners, or on tablets as a sales tool for DuPont's presence at conferences, etc.
The Work
I began working with our art director and business analyst on understanding the purchaser's needs and the overall experience of buying these polymers. Given our scope, we were limited to multiple stakeholder interviews to glean the current sales experience and challenges. I then began creating an interaction model and early sketches to capture the design decisions being made throughout these interviews, which also allowed us to extract & relate the attributes' popularity and desirability to their customers.
As this matrix was formed, interaction/responsive design concepts were presented to DuPont for direction setting and validation. This immediately informed the work with the art director on producing four possible design directions that the tool could take. As designs progressed with our DuPont clients, functional prototypes created in Axure were used on mobile device to demonstrate our progress defining the IxD of the tool.
I then used these functional prototypes to collaborate with our lead front-end developer on a fully functional HTML prototype that would be created as a documentation-as-code deliverable to DuPont's technical vendor, alongside my own annotated documentation to capture UX elements that could not be captured in the prototype.
The Result
A highly well-received tool that in DuPont's own words simplified the selection of high-performance plastics, was one of the cleanest handoffs of any DuPont project we had engaged on, and became a benchmark for process for heavy interaction design and UI prototyping projects in our Experience Architecture team.
