Batesville (B2B Platform)

Help Funeral Home Professionals serve families

Users need to order and track caskets through BOO (Batesville Online Ordering) without calling a representative assistance.

Users want to:

• Order products
• Display inventory to families
• Engage with Batesville content

What I Did

Stakeholder Interviews, Task Analysis, and User Interviews

Stakeholder interviews revealed a pattern of Batesville representatives being overloaded with calls about orders that could instead be placed in BOO.

I wrote the script and facilitated a combination of task analysis and user interviews with 6 Funeral Home Professionals who use the BOO syste to discover why some users preferred calling over using the BOO portal.

• We arranged the meetings virtually over Zoom so that we could observe what the funeral home professionals were doing in the portal while also hearing their realtime thoughts on the experience.
• The users we interviewed came from across the country with varying degrees of interaction with Batesville and the BOO portal. The percentage of the users' orders placed online (vs. over the phone) ranged from 15% - 100%.

Sample questions from the user interviews:

• "What information is most important to you when placing an order?"
• "What challenges have you faced in ordering a casket?"
• "Has there ever been a time in which ordering a casket felt surprisingly easy? What made it easy?"

What We Learned

Personalizing orders is popular, but problematic when users want to quickly get off the site and back to other work

• A popular feature of the portal is personalizing caskets and urns by adding accessories and engravings, but completing and confirming this task in BOO created user frustration.
• Users reported feeling that you have to "jump through hoops" in order to get where they needed to go and had trouble personalizing urns at checkout. This would interrupt the checkout process, sometimes to a point where users would end up leaving BOO to call instead.
• To alleviate this pain point and create a smoother checkout flow, the task of urn engraving was moved to earlier in the ordering process and users only needed to confirm their selections when checking out.
• I developed the wireframes and prototype for this new checkout process.

Make it easy and straightforward

Previously in the BOO portal, users would need to click into an item in their cart in order to view or edit its personalization details. I made this experience more streamlined and scannable so that users would be able to quickly view and make changes to their orders without being taken out of the checkout process.

Results:

• This project resulted in a larger deal with Batesville's parent company, Hillenbrand.
• I parted with this project before development, though were have stayed on, my next steps would have been to complete task analyses with the prototype to compare results of the original design and redesign.
• I wrote and began analyzing the responses of a BOO-focused survey sent out to users to gain further insight around current portal usage.