AUG 2014 - SEP 2015 | Senior UX Consultant
Managing user accounts for Patent and Trademark customers and employees provided a disconnected experience using 3 different secured authentication systems to work with patent and trademark applications. Often an application would have teams of attorneys, paralegals, managers and associates accessing an ongoing case and the siloed systems were not set up to manage teams forcing users to share their usernames and passwords for sensitive itellectual properties.
USPTO was investing in a project to bring user accounts into a unified, branded experience for customers and employees through a super secure single sign-on. The current scenario included multiple authentication and permissions paradigms for the different patent and trademark organizations to access completely different systems in the USPTO network.
This role would require collaborating with different product and development teams to craft the right user experience within the constraints of existing systems and integration of a COTS product for authentication and account management. Plus there was the added challenges of working to create a design pattern library with a newly evolving brand.
But the most interesting aspect of the project was allowing team access, roles management and an invitation workflow, as we found that firms often had more than resource working on their application and were sharing their usernames, passwords and FOBs to access accounts.
To make the experience more cohesive for the end users we would also design a workflow tool to help clients manage multiple applications and the administration of their awarded patents and trademarks.
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USPTO had begun to use a design led approach in creating new projects which put me in a hybrid role somewhere between a UX Strategist and Product Owner. UCD and Design Thinking practices would allow our UX deliverables to find integration in an Agile development process. I took responsibility for creating a plan to inform stakeholders, understand our audiences and start interviewing users through a continuous innovation approach for ongoing improvements.
In parallel, we would begin exploring concepts for a single sign-on experience that would provide an uber-secure session for users and teams of a variety of patent and trademark apps. Unifying work in both organizations would be a secondary goal, requiring us to develop a workflow portal to help busy users stay on top of a potentially large number of ongoing cases.
Results. An MVP that was a 508 compliant, branded product experience that aligned with the business objectives and simplified secure authentication in a product still being used today.
Strategy. This was the first time the agency had taken a holistic view of their user base, which fueled a lot of collaboration with different teams to address the complexities of a single-sign-on across the siloed legacy applications that used a variety of methods including FOBs and magic group codes. Using earlier research and a bunch of raw data from previous questionnaires, we were tasked with creating a competitive analysis, UCD plan, personas and a roadmap. As the project progressed there was considerable socialization of the ideas, both internally and externally. One channel used to get user feedback was IdeaScale, and it allowed users to vote on ideas generated by our team or the community.
Research. After a bit of political debate, our team was tasked with interviewing users from both the Trademark and Patent organizations to identify their pain points and find opportunities to improve workflows and create a unified experience. Talking to these participants was eye-opening, immersing ourselves in the challenges associated with intellectual properties and the risk involved. We employed both quantitative and qualitative research methodologies including surveys, contextual inquiries, user testing and one-on-one interviews, providing our team with enough data to inform ideation.
Users. We found eight types of users outside of the agency including attorneys, account managers, paralegals and inventors, plus a handful of employee profiles that accessed systems daily. The big disconcerting fact was the variety of ways they secured their accounts and how openly that access was shared within a law firm or corporation. Understanding the motivations, behaviors and goals of the different categories of users would help us in defining a rich environment for customers to interact with their cases. To encourage our stakeholders and teams to empathize with users we shared our findings and began the process of presenting concepts to create a seamless experience, championing a more streamlined approach and a unified user experience.
We also discovered that most users thought of software as human, similar to the way they interacted with other apps. Because we wanted a friendly conversational tone, we created a persona for myUSPTO to help us brand the experience and aid in the copywriting for the UI and workflows.
Definition. Once we understood the pain points our next step was to start creating UX user stories to inform the multiple teams on the opportunities we identified, direction we would take and our rational for the decisions. This was a government agency, requiring considerable documentation, presentations and collaboration. Our user stories followed a simple template, providing not only screen shots of the features but often workflows and links to the prototype to access detailed information, like various user and system error states, in order to inform backend teams of our direction. A very collaborative exercise was required to conform to the limits of the COTs app while providing an optimal user experience.
Ideation. The client had a good idea of what they wanted from the project, so we began workshops with the product and development teams and produced initial concepts to share with the executive stakeholders. The best solution was to build a workflow application that provided corporations, legal teams, inventors and employees the right workflows to improve their productivity with ongoing Patent and Trademark cases displayed after sign-in with a snapshot of all their on-going applications and the next steps in a lengthy process.
Prototyping. There was a heavy interaction design component to the project, so we began with low-fidelity prototypes to explore frameworks for a user-customizable dashboard in hopes to begin to bridge the gaps in the organization for users. Because so many development teams were using the prototype for direction, we found we needed to account for a number of user and system errors that could occur, as well as communicating password rules and a variety of authenticate - unauthenticated states, and access levels, to satisfy security requirements. To add to the challenge, we were using Oracle as a backend and a number of features would require negotiations to come to a compromise that accomplished our user experience goals.
Visual Design. The natural evolution of the prototype was to start to explore visual design, iconography and typography to establish a consistent visual language. During this period USPTO also had begun a project to create a design system with another vendor, so the work we had done helped inform the creation of the design pattern library and we began to build Axure libraries that matched the HTML being generated. This period of exploration with lots of opportunity to find a visual stye that was unexpected and communicated a modernization of an historic organization.
Testing. A considerable amount of testing was throughout the product lifecycle. A/B testing, PIN testing, device testing and of course, heuristic and 508 testing. Interestingly, the USPTO was not set up with a network that allowed Mac and iOS devices. To add to the challenge there were a variety of restrictions on the use of outside vendors. In the end, we found we could use browser stack to address the challenge but it had to be done outside of the agency.
Training. The big day came, and we were officially in Alpha which meant spending a few weeks working with the Customer Service organization training them on the new account creation workflows and answering questions that could arise using the portal framework.
An MVP that was a 508 compliant, branded product experience that aligned with the business objectives and simplified secure authentication in a product still being used today. There were also several processes and artifacts that would be used to inform product, development and executive teams for some time. As I look at product today I still see l a lot of room for improvement, which could be the result of poor engagement or a lack of relevant content but they are still using the work we created 8 years ago.
