Learn, Buy, Manage, & Support:
A digital Experience Framework
An experience-optimized approach I developed for arranging information and tools within a digital platform and is centered around customer tasks.
The Problem
Honeywell’s primary digital customer touchpoint is a web portal with a collection of 25+ applications behind a secure login that support end-to-end needs for customer accounts, from e-commerce to technical support to a host of SaaS IOT web-apps. Over the years it has grown without an overarching digital strategy and now its information architecture (IA) mirrors Honeywell’s internal structure. This is causing negative customer-experiences and usability issues: app’s are silo’d and can’t share data between themselves, app’s display conflicting data, information is not where the customer expects it to be, and navigation of it all requires intimate familiarity.
My Approach
Map the who, the what, and the how within the customer journey to understand user activity and goals inside the web portal
Affinitize the collection of tasks into 4 major categories: Learning, Buying, Managing, & Supporting
Create an ideal state information architecture (IA) based on the observed tasks
Work with different teams to across Honeywell Aerospace, and in some cases across the entire Honeywell company, to adopt the framework
Current State Analysis
Diving In
Our digital tools and website don’t share data amongst each other, nor an IA and navigation. What is the impact on our customers? A fractured experience. To illustrate this problem, I walked a common scenario in our customers’ shoes.
The Scenario: An maintenance technician (Persona) has isolated a problem on an aircraft to a Honeywell mechanical system and now needs to rely on our digital touchpoints to solve:
Where the problem is within the system
How to repair it
How to order and replace parts for the repair
Analysis of this very common scenario shows numerous roadblocks that prohibit an efficient task-completion. Our applications and information are not organized to facilitate user tasks, but instead organized by internal needs and the missions of teams operating in silo.
There are 5 different locations to transact depending on the product, there are 5 different locations to get support depending on the type of support, and there are front doors, side doors, and trap doors into many tools.
High user-effort is driven by silo’d applications; business teams launch new functionality without an overarching, shared strategy nor an understanding of their customers journey.
Customers are forced into pogo-stick behavior to accomplish discreet but often related tasks.
Discovered User Needs
Product & Aircraft-Centric Views. I only work on or fly specific aircraft and therefore only specific Honeywell product is relevant - only show me the tools and data necessary for me to support those.
One Location For Everything Relevant To My Task. You make me jump from point to point little-to-no affordance and my success rate drops and frustration rises - bring everything to me.
Shared Data. Your teams don’t talk to one-another, your apps don’t talk to one-another, but you are all Honeywell; don’t make me update my information or re-enter information multiple times in every channel.
The Ideal State
A framework for a centralized, single point-of-entry to the end-to-end (E2E) touchpoints in the Honeywell Aerospace web ecosystem. Accessible from the field (mobile) and search engine optimized. Inspired by Persona behavior and connected to facilitate task-accomplishment.
Enabled by headless app development and capitalizes on Honeywell’s Sitecore and Adobe CMS’s.
UI mechanisms, content, and data need to support the highlevel customer tasks/jobs, discovered via the digital experience analysis. This can be applied to any digital product, site, or feature:
Learn: everything the customer needs to discover the value of an offering or tool and its component-makeup, and get up to speed on the latest activity, information, etc.
Buy: available and intuitive access to app’s, features, or tools that allow users to transact.
Manage: immediate access to all the tools a user needs to utilize their product(s) and service(s) in their day-to-day; from contracts to data trending and prognostics to training.
Support: proactively provide the user everything they need to support the offering, from self-service app’s to dedicated services, through its lifecycle.
Example of how Learn, Buy, Manage, and Support guides content and contextual links/navigation required for a marketing product page to support the end-to-end lifecycle of that product:
UX Architecture by Jason Minyard. IXD/VizD by Roberto Gudino
Project Outcome
NOTE: This project did not begin as a funded effort - it was my influence in discovering latent user needs and influencing the appropriate stakeholders to take action.
