Great Places needed a redesign of their .NET CRM system to improve the usability and efficiency for their admin teams.

Great Places are a housing association based here in the UK. They provide and manage over 15,000 homes, mostly in the northwest. At the centre of this is their CRM (Customer relationship management) system called Axis, where Great Places internal admins teams control, manage and analyse customer interactions and data throughout the customer lifecycle. Their system had become old, outdated, in desperate need of a usability audit and redesign.

Client
Great Places Housing Group

Product
CRM System Redesign

Project Timescale
2 months

Involved Teams
Developers

Visual Designers
Great Places Stakeholders

Design process

 

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Evaluation and Analysis

Redesigns should start with knowing what the user needs are. UX Workshops and audits allowed Great Places admins teams to convey they problems they encounter with the current system and how it was designed. Design issues caused processing and data input speeds to suffer. A UX analysis ensued that outlined navigation, usability, functionality, and data input related issues that needed better design solutions.

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Information Architecture

The CRM was complex with a multitude of screens, different states and individual UI components. The redesign began with the wider structure and information structure. Rearranging key screens with a focus on placing more emphasis on the most important information. This would make for a more fluid and productive user experience.

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Wireframing

Wireframing tasks began to illustrate new concept and ideas. These ideas were presented to both digital teams and real users at Great Places to gather their insight and feedback. The most prominent addition changed the nature of their dysfunctional homepage, adopting it to a create fully interactive dashboard that would be driven by a users activity within the system.

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UI Design and Toolkit

A fresh new UI was required to bring the wireframing and new appraoch to life. With a large amount of a complex data to illustrate, a controlled appraoch to the user-interface design was needed. An atomic design approach that focuses on designing patterns, components and elements apposed to pages, ensured the final interface was technically compliant, consistent and usable.

Examples

 

 

 

 

 

“Designing a desktop based product is very different to designing a brochure website. It’s more orientated around the ease of completing specific tasks than it is getting users to buy or commit to something. That’s what made this project particularly interesting to work on. The admin team at Great Places have an incredibly difficult and fast paced job to do, and I get great comfort in knowing this redesign will make their day jobs a little easier.”

Martin Fletcher, UX Designer, EPIK