Role: UX Researcher and Designer
Team: UX Researcher, Design Lead, Solution Architect, Product Manager
Timeframe: Four weeks
Deliverable: User interviews and persona development

EECOL Electric

The Challenge

EECOL Electric Corporation is a distributor of electrical as well as automation and control products such as programmable controls, motion sensors, motor controls, frequency drives, soft starters, electronic interface products and more. They are headquartered in Calgary, Alberta and were looking to expand more across the country.

EECOL needed to validate their business assumptions in order to effectively modernize their existing customer experience, further digitize their portfolio of offerings, and develop their e-commerce journey forward.

Long-term business goals:

Short-term business goals:

Modernize customer experience
Create revenue and sales growth
Drive growth through digital channels
Expand into new markets and territories

Understand our customers and what their needs are:
- Learn why they shop at EECOL and gauge the level of brand loyalty
- Understand what EECOL offers that competitors do not
- Ask about their likes and pain-points with the existing e-commerce platform
- Discuss their “wish-list” of features they would like to see.
Understand our internal stakeholders about their experiences including:
- Internal marketing and brand team
- Sales Representatives
- Branch Managers
- Operations

The Process

I worked alongside other designers and researchers, key business stakeholders and our technical team to understand the current customer experience. As this was the first phase, my primary goal was to understand the current end users and the operational side of different stakeholders at EECOL. I accomplished this phase in two parts:

1. Stakeholder mapping exercises:

For the first workshop, we facilitated conversations where we took approximately 10 business stakeholders through a series of questions to identify the current hierarchy and roles internally in their company, as well as externally, from the user’s side
Once this information was documented, a visual mapping exercise was done in Mural where participants were able to work collaboratively
together to categorize roles and relationships of the business and customer. This resulted in a visual artifact outlining how different business stakeholders saw the organization user relationships differently

View full business stakeholder map here — Sample of business stakeholder map.

2. User interviews and persona development:

Once the stakeholder mapping was complete, we were able to better identify which internal and external users would be best to interview to gain further insights. This selection process was highly collaborative with the client, to make sure the interviewee selections were highly involved individuals, and who would have open constructive input
Seven external users were interviewed on their e-commerce experience with the EECOL website and four internal users for their customer relations experiences and business processes and how important digitization was for them. This information was critical to understanding how our current users were feeling and what their needs and pain-points were
Once the interviews were complete, the findings were synthesized and translated to map themes and trends from different interview outcomes. This directly helped to begin shaping the development of personas

The Solution

Stakeholder map:

After multiple facilitated discussions with key EECOL business stakeholders, I worked with our solution architect and product owner to map out and identify stakeholder relations. This was communicated through an interactive map, highlighting the business relationships throughout the company

High-fidelity personas:

Screen Shot 2021-03-04 at 3.41.30 PM.png

I remotely presented seven high-fidelity personas to ten EECOL stakeholders from all across Canada and provided in-depth rationale behind the research findings and how multiple personas related to one another
View all full seven high-fidelity personas below.

Results:

EECOL has since taken the research findings done and have distributed to different internal teams for collaboration purposes. The CEO has also personally printed the presented personas for in-office use as visual reference/reminders for future cross-company business decisions