kynetec:
user portal

PRODUCT DESIGN + UX OPTIMIZATION

THE ASK:

Kynetec is a data and insights company that supports massive global agriculture initiatives across the corporate level crop and animal health industries. They asked our team to come in for design and “minimal UX” fixes for their main product’s Administration Portal; MyKynetec.

With over a decade of success, MyKynetec was receiving consistent and numerous pain points from their account managers and clients regarding the portal’s overall usability and functional experience.

Participation
Design Direction
Product Design
UX/UI Design

Client
Kynetec

Year
2023

Despite this challenge, the CTO had hired McKinsey to do an assessment and high-level strategy to improve the MyKynetec portal before we came on. Our team had both the Design and Strategy resources available to better understand the issues and come up with actionable solutions. They asked our team to come in to help them with a recent McKinsey assessment that identified a series of usability gaps and pain points gathered from considerable research within their segmentation & vertical.

PAIN POINTS

While the tools work well to provide an overview of the big picture, it's not intuitive enough to export, sort and/or filter through the data to make personalized spreadsheets.
Repetitive & similar menus are overused to the point where users are confused on function & doesn't lend to consistent usability standards. Components bounce around the layouts in a way that is not optimized for intuitive UX or UI.
The brand guidelines for color usage was not vetted through proper accessibility testing. Poor contrast ratios and opacities make CTAs and other components feel hidden or un-engageable.
Elements that have the most priority do not surface first. Users are forced to wade through minutiae and erroneous tasks before they can engage with primary CTAs.

THE CHALLENGE:

After over 18 months of internal discussion and attempted solutioning, my team was finally brought on by their new CTO after reluctancy & pushback from their Head of Development at the time. There was a clear disconnect between how the lens of UX could be applied and how their Development Team wanted to operate. Previous negative experiences with other teams may have caused an biased perspective.

RISK FACTORS

Disjointed UX across products and marketing landscapes may raise questions about the consistency of the ecosystem, marketing messaging, and brand story.
Aging UX/UI may lead to lower NPS score and raise concerns about their ability to retain or acquire new customers as competitors build more user-friendly tools to expand their market share.
Constant creation of custom dashboards and data visualizations for clients is becoming a barrier to scale without introducing templating and automation.
May not compete with other in-market product from a usability and accessibility standpoint. The product looks and feels antiquated which has turned off many prospects in the Sales funnel.

THE PROCESS:

Upon initial Discovery, we found there was a considerable amount of background material and uncategorized requirements to sift through to fully grasp the challenges. We sorted through multiple perspectives & personas amplified by a long list of complaints and frustrations that had been collected from years of engagement responses. The client was deeply motivated to address these issues as soon as possible as it was impacting the relationships of their most valuable customers. Once we established an initial team responsibility model (RACI Chart), we found it easier to get the answers we needed.

Requirement Organization & Hierarchy

Requirement Re-Prioritization Workshop

Requirement Funneling Exercise

Final Prioritization Scope & Alignment

As the requirements were being re-written, we decided to collaborate much closer with Key Stakeholders and interview them to confirm reported pain-points and desired improvements. We found there were a lot of personal feelings regarding how the team’s issues were prioritized and resolved; including the structure and efficiency of the existing workflow.

We offered to assist in restructuring and further defining what was truly important and how much business value it had in reality vs perception to accomplish with the time we had. Ultimately, we crafted a new MVP pilot strategy and delivery timeline to solve, build and test our solution before focusing on how to fix everything at once.

The Strategy & Design Teams sifted through all the resources & links to ascertain baseline requirements and a priority matrix. We ran workshops and exploration exercises with the client to provide clarity and understanding to our findings and dove deep into the more difficult areas together and work through them side-by-side with key Product Owners & Stakeholders. We also held multiple working sessions with Business Analysts, Project Managers, and Development Leads to align on prioritizing tasks, provide context for assumptions, and find compromises to strong opinions.

Redefined Project Goals

Complete an Estimated Timeline of all the work to be done by the Design and Development teams using AGILE methods for MVP delivery
Onboard new resources and educate everyone on responsibilities and delivery processes
Based on Material UI in Figma to be coded in Storybook for a mature CSS snippet library of customizable components and styles that meets base-level AA WCAG Accessibility Guidelines.
Maintain priority of requirements in accordance to the sprints using components from the new DLS.

We now had documentation & process to begin attacking our UX/UI design deliverables with confidence and clarity:

Realigned design process

We worked with the Product Owners and Business Analysts to capture and record all of the existing product into a sitemap. This sitemap was used constantly throughout the entire process to double check and confirm everything that we were building was on brand and relatively inline with the previous system to maintain the light UX touch that they requested.
Crafting an early-stage prototype helped us make sure that the requirements were being met within reason. For instance: we wanted to introduce a new navigation menubar, but had to pivot because it couldn’t be built into the back-end with the development team they had now. So, we made sure it was in the backlog and documented for later.
We had to regroup or compromise on how the components were made in order to optimize the time the front-end development team needed to build out the DLS. An example of a component we compromised on was creating an alternative to a drop-down menu within a table. Any new components or elements that needed to be designed were discussed with front-end developers and built in tandem.
A few hi-fi prototypes were built for better understanding of user flows and interaction validation. The designs and the reasonings behind them were discussed in detail with the Business Analyst and development team during Design Review sessions against feedback and data collected via research.
We were able to confirm validation by getting final buy-in with making selective changes with key stakeholders, account representatives, and client decision-makers to ensure a high adoption rate post-launch.

THE RESULTS:

Design hand-offs to the development team were completed on time in accordance to the sprint schedule. The designs were received with rave reviews from both our client and their client base. We maintained a very low billable rate to make any design changes upon request. Unfortunately, Kynetec had to put their budget towards other priorities and had to pull out of our contract although they wanted to keep us on. They are hoping to continue with the modernization project in in the future.