Ricoh USA -Leasing Dealer Portal
Timeline - 12 weeks
Overview
Ricoh USA produces electronic products, primarily cameras and office equipment such as printers, photocopiers, fax machines, projectors, offers Software as a Service (SaaS) document management applications such as DocumentMall, RicohDocs, GlobalScan, Print&Share etc.
Ricoh also offers customer to lease Ricoh products. The current process of leasing happens offline. So, Ricoh approached us with the request to make the leasing process digital and bring it online.
We received the functional design document from client. Based on that I created a research plan.
Design Approach
Discover | Stakeholder Interviews
We reached out to client and found out the key stakeholders(multiple teams were involved design, development, product owner etc) . Then we interviewed them. The interviews served to establish the objectives of the project. This meeting helped us to better understand the current leasing process, long term vision of the portal, business goals and any technical limitations of the platform. We also got to know some pain points from the stakeholders that the current vendors are facing.
Insights from stakeholder interviews:
-
Vendors/Dealers are not be the actual customer. They might be third party agency which will apply for a lease on behalf of a customer.
-
Current leasing process: After the stakeholder interviews, we got a better understanding of the leasing process. Currently leasing of the Ricoh products happens offline. Ricoh sales team reach out to vendors with offers or vendors reach out to Ricoh sales team to apply for a lease. Vendors have to provide a lot of information on behalf of the customer for whom they are applying the lease and if the lease is approved, the Ricoh admin team will reach out to the vendors and provide few documents which they have to get signed from the customer and then they have to send signed documents back to Ricoh. After the documents are received from the vendor, Ricoh Admins will then review the documents and if it’s incorrect, they again have to reach to vendors to correct it. If the signed documents received are correct then they have upload all the information in Ricoh database. Only after this the order is created and the products are shipped to the customer provided location.
-
Few technical limitations of the oracle platform.
Discover | Vendor Interviews
Ricoh team helped us arranged interview with four different vendors who are working with Ricoh. Starting with the simple demography questions we made users comfortable. Followed by more open-ended questions, we tried to understand users pain points and what are they expecting from the new dealer portal.
Few questions we asked:
-
Can you walk us through the process for applying for equipment leasing from Ricoh?
-
What challenges/difficulties have you faced during this process?
-
How do you typically send the signed forms to Ricoh and what happens next?
-
What are your expectations from the new portal?
Discover | Ricoh Admin Interviews
Following the vendor interviews, we conducted three interviews with Ricoh admins. The process was the same as vendor interviews where we tried to uncover the roles of the admin, their pain points, their expectations and mental models.
Few questions we asked:
-
Could you describe the steps involved in processing a vendor’s lease application?
-
What challenges do you encounter while reviewing these application?
-
How do you communicate with vendors, and how do you notify them of approvals or rejections?
-
What are you expectations from the new portal?
Discover | Research Top Findings
Four steps till order creation
Vendors side take three steps. Apply for lease, provide more information and download necessary documents and upload the signed document. Then RFS admin validate the uploaded document and the order is created.
Customer creation
A new customer is created in the backend if it has unique name and address or same name and unique address or unique name and same address.
Fill out redundant information
Vendors have to provide a lot of redundant information when they are applying for the same customer multiple times. And RFS admins have to fill out the information provided by the vendors in Ricoh database.
Manually organize applications and documents
Both vendors and RFS admins have to manually track and organize all the applications and documents which takes alot of time and effort.
One mode of communication
Vendors and RFS team have to rely on emails for all the communication.
Define | Persona
Based on our research, I developed 2 user personas: Dealer persona and RFS Admin persona.
Ideate | User Flows
Ideate | Design Solutions
-
Reduced Redundancy: The portal pre-populates customer information from past applications, minimizing data entry for repeat customers.
-
Minimal Information Before Credit Approval: The initial application process focuses on capturing essential details to expedite credit checks. Only after initial approval might additional information be requested if necessary.
-
Organization & Tracking of Application: Applications are organized based on their status. Users can view/filter applications based on different properties.
-
Streamlined Data Entry: An auto-complete/auto-suggestion feature on multiple fields like product information, address etc.
-
Centralized Communication: Added comment section & chat feature(no live chat).
Ideate | Pencil Sketches
Based on the established pain points and user flows, I sketched multiple options to test and present it to the client and only after it was approved by the client, I started designing them on Axure RP.
Design | Low Fidelity Prototype
After our paper sketches got approved, I created a low fidelity prototype using the rapid prototyping tool 'Axure RP'.
-
Applications in Worklist tab requires action from vendors.
-
Applications in In Process tab are applications which are in progress.
-
Applications in Closed tab are either rejected or closed.
-
Users can copy an application and modify details in them.
-
Users can sort, filter or search for an application.
-
Users can export reports.
-
Users can apply for lease by clicking on “Create new application”.
-
When dealer starts typing legal name, an autosuggested list is shown with legal name, city, state and zipcode, if the customer is already in ricoh database. If the customer is not in ricoh database, no autosuggest list is shown and the dealer has to type in the customer name.
-
When a name is selected from the list, it gets automatically populated in the legal name field.
-
When dealer starts typing the address, an autosuggested list is shown with all the addresses related to the customer name selected above with address, city, state and zipcode, if the customer is already in ricoh database. If the address of that customer is not in ricoh database, no autosuggest list is shown and the dealer has to type in all the address fields
-
When an address is selected from the list, it gets automatically populated in all the address related fields.
When dealer clicks on “Continue” button, after filling all the information, all the fields are disabled. If the customer is not in Ricoh database, then a new customer is created.
To view the full prototype, please visit this link
Test | Usability Tests
We arranged a usability testing session with the vendors and Ricoh admins that were part of the interviews earlier. We gave our participants a few tasks in order to test the usability of the portal. This was the point where we uncovered the problems that the users are facing. All the findings were collected, processed, and presented to Ricoh during the final presentation & prototype.