Avarn Security Group (formerly known as Nokas) reached out to Nethouse while I was working there. They needed a system to help them improve their sales process of alarms and surveillance equipment.
Their sales personnel where equipped with tablets on which they entered sale information and showed customers the equipment. The idea was to use these tablets with a custom built system that streamlined and improve this process.
The system that we built enabled the sales personnel to create new projects for each unique sale. The first step in each project was to add customer information and contact details. The second step was to take a photograph of the floor plan that sits at the entrance of every commercial building in Sweden. The photograph was then used as the “background” in the new project, the users could search for various equipment and drag and drop them on the floor plan to instantly show the customer where each alarm, camera and other equipment would be mounted and map out the installation.
The system also calculated pricing and materials in real-time, allowing the sales representatives to generate and send very detailed quotations and installation plans directly to customers on the spot.
The sales configurator (as we called it) was also accompanied by a backend system where backend users could add new equipment, upload icons to each item that where used to show the item on the map, add pricing and other material that was needed for each item.
The end result and reception for this system from the users where great. They loved to be able to live-edit the project in front of the customer, which enabled them to discuss and collaborate with the customer about equipment, possibilities and quickly generating a quotation with no lead-time. This kind of visualisation really helped the sales personnel and was very appreciated.
My role in this project was to design the User Experience, User Interface, the components used to build it and lead the testing. The system was branded according to Avarns styling guide.
As usual in our team we worked iteratively in sprints in this project. We started by meeting and talking to the customer and their users to gain as much understanding about their daily work as possible. This research continued throughout the project when we developed new areas and designed new prototypes to make sure that we where on the right track.
The design process was as per usual heavily focused on understanding the user needs, mapping their workflows in user story maps. I iterated quickly on the user flows and the UI design and presented my prototypes to the customer on a regular basis. I also tested my prototypes on them to make sure that they felt the solution was good and actually solved the problems they where having, after this the developers started working on the function, user flow or area that I had designed.
The testing process began at the same time as the design process started. By understanding the customer, requirements, technical design set up by the developers, users and their environments as well as the technical devices to be used in order to prioritise the testing efforts. By incorporating testing early in the process we identified risks and worked as proactively as we possible could to minimise these risks that could cause potential problems further down the road.
The testing involved functional, backend, frontend, compatibility, hardware, usability, exploratory testing as well as test planning, test strategy and test design. I involved the entire team in testing sessions, ensuring continuous feedback and improvement during each iteration as well as user testing with the customer. I also coached and helped the customer to organise themselves to perform acceptance tests before the delivery of each iteration and the full system.