Cognizant/ WB
Worked as a UI/UX Design (Programmer Analyst), a full-time job experience for 3.2 years. I designed and managed the Financial Enterprise Platform, ERP Systems in a B2B environment, and responsible for managing digital content for an entertainment client.
Content is under NDA - Presented most of the work in Low fidelity wireframes.
Design Work
I worked as a UI/UX Design analyst at Cognizant for a US-based entertainment client. I closely worked with development teams, clients in Agile, and waterfall developmental methodologies. In the span of 3 years, I worked on multiple projects related to Financial MIS, ERP, and Digital content management.
MY ROLE
UX/UI design (Prorgammer Analyst)
TIMELINE
May 2016 - July 2019
TEAM
Abhinav (Myself)
Development Team based in India.
Clients based in the US.
TOOLS
Code
HTML, CSS, JavaScript, React JS
Design
Adobe XD, JustinMind Prototyper
Collaboration
Jira, Skype for Business
Research
MySQL/ Oracle Database, Internal tools*
Financial Enterprise Application Design - AIRS
About the Application.
I joined a team that manages the airdate and residual payments MIS system for an entertainment client. The system has a complex architecture that handles the payments to various guilds in the US entertainment industry.
My Responsibilities.
I joined the team as a junior UX/UI design analyst. My work involved designing the Information Architecture flows, High-fidelity mockups, Develop UI interfaces in HTML/CSS. I got involved in usability studies with clients, Cross-platform/browser, use-case testing.
My Design Work.
I worked in an Agile workflow collaborating on daily Scrum calls, weekly sprint planning, review and demos, and retrospective meetings. I got involved in creating early architectures, designing and developing UI screens for the foreign guild.
Design Scenario.
In mid of 2017, the Client has a key requirement by introducing guild payment rules to foreign Cast and Crew members. Currently, there are no payments being processed or released for foreign members. The client wants us to develop a "Simple payment tracking and reports for the foreign categories."
Challenge:
Currently, the application has only payment tabs on the header and dashboard to show the status of different payments. Our team needs to come up with different proposals to implement the screens within the stipulated timeframe with fewer development hours.
My Approach:
Our team planned to come up with two proposals per member before the sprint planning meeting. As we have the access to the Business Analysts but not the users directly, I started to collect their requirements through daily scrum calls and gathered the needs and pain-points in a couple of days.
Proposal 1:
Redesign the header by introducing a master header with two categories "Guilds" and "Foreign" and duplicate the payment screens for each category.
Pros:
Development effort is greatly reduced.
Similar UX to the application user.
Cons:
Existing UX/UI issues will be duplicated.
Risks:
Users should be aware of the category.
Proposal 2:
Design new foreign guild screens under each of the payment sections, reports and add filters at each payment table to sort for the foreign guild.
Pros:
Existing UX/UI issues will not be duplicated.
Users will be aware of the category.
Cons:
Development effort is high.
Risks:
Higher chances of missing payment rules.
Yay! Proposal 1 was chosen:
Client approved proposal 1 as the users would track the foreign guild payments separately from the rest of the Guilds and it would be a one-time effort for the development teams to get the change in the header than in individual pages.
Design:
The existing payment screen nav links are moved to Subnav and a new header is built to show the main categories "Guild" and "Foreign". The screens were duplicated and the code is reused by modifying the rules relevant to the foreign guild.
Overall Impact.
The project is implemented in 6 months and within 12 sprints. The design decision made this possible and the project received applications from the client.
Key Takeaways.
Design decisions have a huge impact on both the implementation and the usability of the product. I learned that as a designer one should always take factors that affect the overall productivity, implementation hours, users' understandability level of the existing and new systems.
Merchandise & Digital Content Platform
Design Challenge.
The entertainment client's official website has film titles, series, news, games, and apps. Now the website needs an add-on by introducing their experiences category which includes selling their merchandise items to both end-customers and third-party vendors.
Design Planning.
The overall purchase model needs to be designed from scratch and a merchandise management system for third-party branding vendors needs to be created. These two systems need to be integrated and monitored in real-time.
Design Iteration 1:
In the first design cycle, our team proposed a new add-on category "Experiences" to the header of the official website. This gave the flexibility to integrate the shop page to the merchandise management system at the back-end.
However, this didn't solve the problem of the third-party vendor purchase challenge. Also, there was no sign-up or log-in feature on the official website which led to customers' confusion.
Design Iteration 2:
To overcome the initial problems, we created a separate e-commerce website to make the users purchase the products. However, as per the client's requirements, we created a route from the official website which could lead the users to the actual website.
Overall Impact.
The solution wasn't the best as users might feel that they are navigating through multiple tabs and not sure, where to create the account. However, the client accepted the overall design of the system.
Key Takeaways.
It is a good practice to make the user travel through their best-known paths, although it could lead to a lengthy approach. Overall, the CTA's should be intuitively placed to make the users' navigation easy.
Testimonals
Sriram Gorti
Product Manager at Cognizant
(AIRS Team)
- Abhinav's appetite for knowledge and passion for generating distinctive solutions to the problems is what has made him stand out. His ability to comprehend business requirements and unique way of achieving efficiency with the help of his programming & design skills have consistently impressed me. His frame of mind and reasoning to achieve the desired output has made him a permanent member of all our design sessions. He coordinates well with his team members and always interacts with seniors to acquire knowledge. This has helped him work independently in any given situation.
Gangadhar bheemanapalli
Product Lead at Cognizant
(WB.com Team)
- Abhinav worked on front-end to back-end integration of Warner Bros' official website (WB.com) in our team. His insight into business requirements and his programming skills has
made this integration successful which helped the client extract huge data regarding the customer behavior, their transaction data, geographic area, etc. from the database to drive revenue growth and improve customer experience. He is adept at UI/UX designs, database management. Apart from his work, Abhinav has a great spirit of helpfulness and immense interest to learn. His perception of how business and technology can benefit each other is what makes him a distinctive individual.
Thanks for reading! Let's explore more of my work!