Improving efficiency by 91%

The problem

Rolls Royce were looking to migrate a large amount of files onto servers in another country. Before migrating these files they had to make sure they didn't contain sensitive data. A team in Rolls Royce were manually reading through files looking for sensitive terms, barely making a dent in the millions of files that needed to be reviewed.

Whilst working as a consultant on behalf of Aiimi, I was tasked with designing a product that would allow this team to review files much more efficiently.

Outcomes

The amount of files being reviewed in 6 months were being reviewed in two weeks once our tool went live. That's a massive 91% improvement.

Research

Understanding the business process

I sat with stakeholders to gain a better understanding of what the review process was from the businesses perspective. To ensure our product would help reviews pass any compliance audits, I asked about what a review actually needed to consist of and what information needed to be captured by the reviewer and why.

Interviews and shadowing

I then interviewed and shadowed the team of file reviewers to gain a deep understanding of their existing process and identify any pain-points and opportunities. A key insight was that users had a set list of terms that they would try to find in huge files, if they found these terms they would list it in a spreadsheet which would eventually lead to it being flagged as unfit for migration abroad.

Ideation

User story mapping

Using the insights gained from the research stage we created a user story map. This map was used to gain a shared understanding of user needs and what our MVP would be working towards.

Understanding technical limitations

With the identified user needs in mind, the development team and I discussed what was and wasn't possible. This discussion ultimately led to us coming up with the ideas that would make this product such a success:

• We'd have the product crawl files looking for key terms, any terms found would be presented in a file report which could be used by reviewers to quickly make a decision on the file's risk. This would remove the need for reviewers to read through massive files.
• The reviewers risk rating could be captured in our product and trigger it to tag the file appropriately. This would remove the need for reviewers to manually create a log in a spreadsheet and another employee finding the file and tagging it.

Wireframing and Prototyping

I used Sketch and Invision to produce a basic prototype that could be used to gather initial feedback from stakeholders and senior members of the review team.

Wireframe of reveiwers page

Usability testing

After agreeing with stakeholders which hypothesis I'd be testing, I conducted usability testing to gain insights on how well the designs performed. The designs performed very well and we were able to identify some key problems with labelling and copy.

Final designs

Using Sketch, a UI designer and I then produced final UI designs that adhered to the Rolls Royce brand guidelines.

Reviewers page design

Going live

Enhancements

I created a plan on how we could gain further insights post release. This plan consisted of analytics analysis, user shadowing and A/B testing. Unfortunately I left the business before this plan could come into fruition.

Outcomes

Despite not being able to go through the 'learn and improve' process, the product performed extremely well when released. The amount of files being reviewed in 6 months were being reviewed in two weeks once our tool went live. That's a massive 91% improvement.