Large Project Case Study

The project

A large power utility with 80% market share in its state has an extensive automated phone system. The documentation of this system is just over 2000 pages long, including design, development, and grammar requirements.

I was the lead designer for this project for more than 2 years. My charter was to unify the tone and persona across this immense project, all while building usable and elegant conversational functionality.

The team

The size of my team varied between 1 and 6 designers. The modular nature of the project provided an ideal environment for new designers and interns to learn the processes involved, with the opportunity to build functionality from start to finish.

Additionally, the customer wanted to use their own internal designers, so I supervised their training and design work as well.

The result

In addition to completing a best-in-class automated system, the customer was thrilled with the quality of work and organization of our team. The designers under me went on to lead successful projects of their own. They brought innovative ideas to the design practice, and their techniques were integrated into the process.

Fraud Case Study

The problem

My large utilities customer had an issue with callers attempting to make check payments using fraudulent routing numbers. This needed to be fixed immediately. The customer provided a list of the routing numbers that needed to be blocked. They also needed a sternly worded message played when the fraud attempt was detected.

The team

We scrambled all the needed skill sets: a UI designer, a Spanish localization specialist, a developer, a QA lead, a speech scientist, and the recording studio. Very quickly, we identified all the details of the solution, laid out a plan for rapid design, implementation, testing, and deployment.

The solution

We added logic to the existing routing number collection to check the given routing number against the list of fraudulent numbers. We worked with the customer’s legal department to finalize the stern warning. We added logic to allow the caller another try to provide a valid routing number. We had all the prompts localized into Spanish, and had all the new prompts professionally recorded.

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The outcome

The turnaround time from reporting the problem to our team to the deployment of the solution, was 36 hours including all the change control restrictions on the customer side. The customer reports that there are no longer any instances of this type of fraud occurring on their automated system.