THE LINNEAN SOCIETY OF LONDON
CRM SYSTEM
Background
The Linnean Society of London is the oldest natural history society in the world. They offer professional membership, research materials, lectures and education to name a few of their services. Their current CRM system is outdated, difficult to navigate and lacks the utility needed to successfully run their wide range of services.
The problem
The key features that the current CRM system offers is membership and committee management, mailing lists and event booking. Staff uptake of the current CRM system has been poor because they feel that it is difficult to use and does not give them the utility they need. The CRM system needs to cover all of The Societys’ services. The platform must also provide the utility that staff need in a simple, intuitive and user friendly interface.
Initial tests
Staff members who were familiar with the current CRM system took an average of 46 seconds to identify the feature or information they were looking for. Within each of these searchers users performed an average of 2 back clicks due to incorrect paths being followed.
Current system
key points for redsign were identified by reviewing the current CRM system.
VISUALLY OUTDATED
The spread sheet layout of large amounts of data is tedious. The excessive use of grey scale is not engaging. The universal association of the colour red with making an error, misplaces its use within this design.The icons also feel outdated.
LOW MEMBERSHIP ACTIVITY
The vast majority of members profiles are incomplete thus prohibiting the membership networking utility of the system. This lack of engagement would also suggest that this outward facing part of the system is either redundant or not fit for purpose.
UNCLEAR INTERACTIONS
The meaning of many of the user interactions are unclear. There is also no colour, size or shape consistency for the buttons and many other interactions.
POOR DATA VISUALISATION
The presentation of data is overwhelming, making it difficult for users to interpret and formulate any actions.
INACCESSIBLE FEATURES
Staff access all the features through a hidden menu option called “admin”, located under a drop down menu when selecting the profile icon.key functions of these features are then further buried within more drop down menus.
Research
I identified two areas of research that would be critical to the project’s value proposition:
PRIMARY RESEARCH
User research to understand the staff and memberships experience of the current system.
SECONDARY RESEARCH
Reviewing CRM system design patterns to implement the latest in design trends.
Key findings
The CRM systems purpose is to manage the membership, receive payments and present useful data on all the societies activities. The users required the following from the CRM system:
ALL ACTIVITIES REPRESENTED
ACTIONABLE DATA
UTILITY UPDATE
PRIMARY USER: STAFF
BETTER TOOLS
UNIQUE
FUNCTIONALITY
Persona
The designs should seek to fulfil the needs of 1 key persona. "The Staff Member" wants the CRM system to be fully integrated with their activities to help speed up and inform their work.
The solution
I asked myself if the following could be achieved:
DATA VISUALISATION
SITEMAP RESTRUCTURE
CLEAR INTERACTIONS
USEFUL FEATURES
ACCESS TO INFORMATION
MODERN UI
Site map
The CRM systems information architecture had critical information and functionality buried at lower levels, making it difficult to access and use. The site map was redesigned to be flat, in order to give users access to information they need as quickly as possible.
Task flow
“Building a personalised dashboard” user flow was designed so that staff members could personalise the homepage for their unique use of the system.
User flow
This user flow enables staff members to personalise their dashboard to suit their individual needs.
Wireframes
Low fidelity wireframes were produced through careful examination of the current CRM system and modern design patterns. Wire frames were produced to cover the full range of features that staff needed. These features were grouped together on separate cards.
High fidelity design
At this stage I revisited my user research key findings to ensure that my designs addressed “how I might”:
Enable users to personalise their dashboard by selecting only the cards with the grouping of features and information that is relevant to their roles.
Create new functions that are needed such as room hire and collections management.
Improve the management of the membership by highlighting fellows, providing engaging membership exploration, with a global map, and access to society wide membership data.
Present useful data on all the societies activities, such as providing accessible data on all the activity related to their collections.
Incorporate all the necessary suggestions and iterations needed to create new functions, such as a building and office management system.
Revisions
The following revisions were card specific and suggested by the member of staff to whom the card was most relevant.
BEFORE
AFTER
COLLECTIONS
Circle toggles were changed into buttons. Additional utility was still needed and so the following features were added: reprographics, online collections, enquiries, tours, readers, environmental tags.
EVENTS
The event organiser needed to easily see the split between revenue from ticket sales versus donations. This information was made available along with event location icons to show if the event was online, on site or in the field.
SHOP
The following labels were changed: “Total sales” changed to “Total revenue”. The “Average revenue” changed to “Actual loss” to take account for loss of earnings from returns, damaged goods, refunds and missing items.
MAILING LIST
The date range for the information being shown was unknown and thus was confusing. A drop down menu was included in the top right hand corner that would allow users to select a date range for the emails that they wanted to see. To make it clear that the data belongs to the selected email, it is now highlighted with an orange fill.
New design tests
After the redesign staff members took an average of 17 seconds to identify the feature or information they were looking for. Within each of these searchers users performed 0 back clicks. The new design was 63% more efficient for users.
Conclusion
The greatest challenge of this project was understanding how to succinctly group the societies different services together on cards that had all the necessary functionality needed for the relevant staff members to do their jobs. Taking my time in the beginning of the project to understand the society and its different services helped me to know where to delineate one area of work from another, in order to produce useful cards with the correct information and utility. There is a considerable amount of designing yet to be done for this CRM system, as there are a number of different user flows that can be created for each of the cards.
Looking forward
It is important to note that the implementation of this redesign would be incredibly difficult for the current CRM system provider or the society, who does not have the money to pay for it to be developed. The purpose of the design was to help guide the society into new ways of thinking about the CRM system, their data and how they might want to approach a large scale CRM system update in the future.