Terpel Discovery

Work

Overview

Terpel is a Colombian gas/oil company which needed and app that gave its users all the information about stations (by proximity), fuel prices, promotions and information of interest for its customers.

My Role:

UX Designer
Designed for:

Globant
Work Team
- Jennifer Gomez - Business Analyst (BA)
- Alejandra Hernandez - Business Analyst (BA)
- Jair Jutinico - UI Designer (UI)
- Mariano Salvetti - Technical Leader (TL)

Initial state

During the last years Terpel created different digital solutions trying to provide its customers with information and programs that will generate value and build loyalty. The results of these solutions were not as expected, so the need to create an APP that brings all this together in one place increase.

Challenges

Our challenges with Terpel were:

1

Achieve a middle ground between the wishes of each of the company areas against the needs of its end-users.
2

Understand and define the needs of end-users.
3

Create an MVP for an estimated development time of 4 months taking into account technical constraints.
4

Build trust in the team and apply a remote workflow.

Our proposal/
Solution

The proposals and solutions to achieve the first MVP were:

1

Understand what had worked and what had not worked in the previous solutions.
2

Definition of personas based on field research to understand what should exist in the app.
3

Understand the business needs of each area of the company.
4

Create a sitemap to the MVP app.
5

Create User Journeys for each Persona created.
6

Show the evolution of the app through prototypes.

My Role

As a UX designer, My Role was to understand the stakeholder's and final user's needs, then mapping an MVP that suits between the project's times and the technological capabilities available at that moment. I also helped the team to have a global vision about the project and organized each sprint according to the plan.

Design Process

Terpel's Discovery Team Work Process

Deliverables

We started with a Discovery phase, which helped the team and the client to see in a clear way the current state of the product and what we want to achieve. During 2 weeks, we developed different activities that gave us the information to find problems, raise hypotheses and propose solutions for our first MVP.

Affinity Diagram & Card sorting

Five (5) sessions with the client, where we asked for writing in post-it the positive and to improve aspects that the current apps had and then what they dream about the new one.

Then the teams were asked to do a card sorting exercise to know what they expected to find in the Ideal app.

Both exercises helped us to obtain insights from the different areas of the company, what they willing, hate and want to keep. Also, be able to validate with users if our findings were something that Terpel users wanted to find in an app.

Surveys

After 1 week of work, we went out to know the users of Terpel. For that we defined 3 types of user:

Gas station Manager
Gas station Worker
Gas station Customer (The person who goes to fill the tank)

We surveyed each of these users to understand what they knew about the brand and their services and, why they preferred this brand over others in the market.

We also sent a digital survey to users with no distinction to knew a little bit more about the perception of the services in the industry of gas/oil in Colombia.

Sitemaps

According to the information collected in the card sorting activity, and after analyzing the Terpel users. We created a sitemap divided into anonimous and register users. This site map gave us the scope of our first MVP.

Proto-Personas

Proto-personas give an organization a starting point from which to begin evaluating their products and to create some early design hypotheses. They’re also helpful in initiating and reinforcing corporate awareness of the customer’s point of view to ensure it’s included in strategic planning. This is especially true when the creators of these proto-personas are in a position to affect the company’s strategic direction

We rely on proto-personas to ensure alignment amongst our client stakeholders.

Help align stakeholders views of the customer.
Gain buy in for user centred design
Help stakeholders and team members be more empathetic to end users needs.

User Flows & User Journeys

Sketches & wireframes

The development of LO-FI wireframes was the first approach of the ideal app shown to the client and stakeholders.

It is one of the results after the research process we execute with the client and their users in the discovery phase.

What's next?

Sprint 0 to 4

After the discovery phase, we started working in an agile environment. Each sprint was for 2 weeks. so we planned to develop the MVP in 16 weeks.

The design team should be one or two sprints ahead of the dev team, So the sprint 0 gave us an idea about the speed of the team and what aspect we needed to improve as a team.

The process in the first sprints was cyclic (Check the image below), and in every sprint, we improve each step according to the feedback and the learnings we obtained ran the project.

Conclusions

What did I learn?

Understand the goals of a company could lead teams to create products that just work for the company's needs, not for the customer's needs. So it's important that in the process of ideation reach a midpoint between company/user's needs and wants. This project taught me how to achieve this balance.

Another important lesson was: Although the business and user aspects are fundamental to accomplish an MVP in the short term when teams are planing the Technical team should be involved in each decision in the planning and creative process since in the end to achieve a digital product successfully is to release it.

What can I do better?

Deep understanting about technical topics to know the real scopes
Usability test with more users
Better communication between the team.