Please note: This is only available to Shelter Insurance agents and I can’t post the designs publicly.
Overview: This is a website agents can go to to get social media posts that have been put together by Shelter’s marketing department.
My Role: When the project first started I was the Lead Front-End Developer but quickly became the UX Designer.
Goal: Provide an easy way for Agents to access social media posts created by Shelter’s Marketing Department. Agents were copying and pasting posts from a PDF and consistently making mistakes. Due to the location of the PDF, it was cumbersome for them to get to the content.
Duration: This project lasted about two years due to losing priority from management a couple of times.
Team: Since this project was so long the team consisted of myself, and three other front-end developers. Only two developers were working on it at the same time.
Research
I was given very little access to Agents for this project so I wasn’t able to research as much as I would have liked.
My attempt to hear from all Agents was to send out a survey. I asked questions about their likes and dislikes of the current system, how often they post to social media sites, what their motivation is for posting, etc.
Other than the survey I was given very limited access to the Agents so I spoke with the people who interacted closely with them. This consisted of Marketing Department employees. I talked to them about their conversations with Agents and asked them what information Agents needed to share, where they were making errors, and what the common complaints and compliments were for the current process.
The Problem
I discovered that The Agents were having a hard time copying and pasting from a PDF document, customizing the content, and weren’t able to access photos for their social media. As a result the following features were implemented:
Display a photo for the Agent to download easily.
Allow Agents to select which words in a sentence would be best for their particular situation. We determined that highlighting the customizable words and allowing them to simply click the word they wanted to use would be the easiest solution for sentence customization. Example: Call me| my office at XXX-XXX-XXXX.
Allow them to enter their contact information and save it in a cookie to allow for auto-filling in posts. Example: Call me at 573-639-9999
Provide an easy way to select and copy all the text after customization.
Allow them to filter based on social media platform and topic.
In speaking with Marketing it became apparent they were dedicating a lot of time to the social media posts. Due to this we decided to provide a section for guidelines, instructions and FAQs to reduce the amount of time Marketing had to spend talking with Agents..
Testing
I was not given permission to take anything to Agents to have them test. Since Marketing spoke with them the most, I tested the application with those who weren’t assisting throughout the development process. I also did some quick hallway tests with Shelter Insurance employees. I looked for employees who had experience posting to social media and had the same amount and type of insurance knowledge as Agents. These participants were as close to representative users as I could get.