Final Project- LCs, LSs, and many more abbreviations.

Time has flown by and we’re already on our final project. I’m really excited that the project we were given is something I’m interested in and is something I know very little about: landscaping. We have three weeks to create a solution for our client that will improve their process so they can focus on what they do best.

We’re working with a client who serves as the connector between landscape contractors (LCs) and landscape suppliers (LSs) in what I’ve learned is a very complicated process. Working with a client in a short amount of time on a big problem, with many problems within the big problem, is challenging and motivating. Our design team is three people and we are using Trello to assign specific tasks to each other and to communicate when we’ll be working together. We take a few tasks for the day, talk about who wants to do what, and prioritize specific tasks to accomplish each day. We’re working backwards from our deadline, leaving the last day open as a buffer for anything that might come up, and tackling everything by making sure we do our key tasks assigned for each day.

Our team spent the first few days making sure we thoroughly understood the process and all of the steps that our client goes through to make their customer happy. The client and his team explained their process, their current challenges, goals, and we asked as many questions as we could. We have been lucky enough to meet with our client’s developer team as well and that was a turning point where we felt like we finally grasped how all of the pieces work together.

Shortly after our meeting, my teammates were out for holiday so I tackled breaking down the current user flow into more digestible chunks. I wanted to create a helpful visual for us so we could piece out the users, how they interact, and were we can focus our efforts to create the biggest positive change for our client in the short amount of time we have.

The web below is how I chunked out who most commonly interacted and the visual representation of how many back and forth communications are currently happening. I felt that seeing the back and forth nature of the processes between our client and their client demonstrates where the design team can provide help.

These two images below are the different sections of the process broken down further. I used different colored post its to show who was in charge of what action and a second row of post its to show when someones ability to take the next step was dependent on another set of actions between other users.

I’m looking forward to syncing back up with my team now that the holidays have passed and seeing where we take our design from here.