Empowering the service sales cycle experience to provide better customer support

Fastems Jeeves

Aalto University CoID & Fastems
Experience-Driven Design course
Tampere, Finland | 2018

Objective: to design a control system that integrates multiple data sources and communicates insights effectively to Fastems employees, enabling them to better support and serve Fastems’ customers.

Contribution: Field research, interviews protocols, insights analysis, concept generation, experience goals definition, experience goals evaluation forms, low fidelity prototypes and usability evaluation.

Fastems is a leading supplier of flexible automation solutions for high-mix CNC manufacturing. At the core of its offering is Manufacturing Management Software (MMS), which processes and plans production orders. However, as the organisation has grown, critical information has become distributed across multiple internal tools, requiring employees to navigate fragmented data in order to support customers effectively.

Recognising that customer experience is directly shaped by internal workflows, Fastems identified the need for a unified internal control system. Grounded in employees’ real needs and daily challenges, the aim was to design a centralised interface that brings together scattered data, enabling teams to act with clarity, speed, and confidence when supporting customers.

XDD process

The project followed a double diamond design process. However, the experience-driven design approach defines first the experience goals because those are the core that drives the conditions for the desired experience. This approach focuses on triggering positive feelings and emotions that a person experience using a product, service or system in a time span.

Understanding Fastems employees

During the research, company employees were interviewed to understand what was meaningful for them in their work, their feelings during the day and their stories. This led us to create three employees personas stories that illustrate their experiences in a day at Fastems.

Experience goals

A new set of experience goals were defined for the project.

INTRIGUE for proactiveness

EMPOWERMENT for confidence

EMPATHY for a sense of community

Intrigue, empowerment and empathy are the momentary experiences proposed for the control system experience. In the long-term, these experiences will generate proactiveness, confidence and a sense of community to employees.

UX design proposal

The outcome of the project is Jeeves, a UI low-fidelity prototype based on an ideal story about Service Sales employees at Fastems. Its design was driven by the experience goals established for the project and the insights we gathered through the research and interviews at the company.

In addition, after setting the final experience goals, during the design phase we developed in parallel different versions of the story and the related prototype, which were successfully evaluated using methods such as AttrakDiff2, Think Aloud and cartoon storytelling.