Webchat app

When I joined Fospha last November there was an urgent need to rebuild all the company’s tools and products. This included the existing web chat support tool already in use by some clients - London boroughs and government support call centres. The redesign was aimed to give our clients a better, more scalable and robust system, presenting users with an improved interface allowing them to get the information they needed faster and more efficiently.
There was a very clear decision internally, that we would take the users and clients interests into account and build a whole new product from scratch based on our research, data, and testing.

The first stage included a series of users interviews and research to help everyone understand what kind of users we were building for and what problems they faced.

We also looked into their ambitions for the future when using the chat tool. Besides all these, everyone had to be extremely aware and careful about data security and sensitive data when building this app so we wouldn’t compromise personal information of any users.

We visited Hammersmith and Fulham’s council call centre and spent a day with their staff, talking about their current tool, their struggles and their desires for a new tool.

This user research helped us to understand what types of users we had, and create personas to help guide the project. With the product owner’s help, we scrutinised a plan with the essential features of the product for the first release.

From here the team started sketching and wireframing a prototype of the app, debating technical details both on the front-end and back-end structures. I kept myself busy researching and testing the usability of the prototype as much as I could so the results could be presented to the team to help everyone feel confident when building the first features.

As time and sprints passed by, all the hard work began to show through. The look and feel and visual language of the product made process and interactions felt very easy to our users. Technically we have a much more scalable and safe solution that we could expand to new clients.

I was very proud to be part of this product development that took a user centric approach since day one and where I had the chance to built the user experience of a product used on a daily basis.

Date: December 2015
Product: www.fospha.com