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

Task Analysis and User Interviews

I co-wrote the script and facilitated a combination task analysis and user interview with 6 Funeral Home Professionals who use the BOO system.

• 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. Some users' inventories only had some Batesville products while others were almost entirely Batesville. The percentage of the users' orders placed online (vs. over the phone) ranged from 15% - 100%.
• The titles of the professionals we met withe were mostly Funeral Home Director or Owner, but we also spoke with a Funeral Associate and Assistant General Manager. All of the professionals we met with were familiar with and often used the BOO portal.

Some 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?"

Why I Did It

Uncover what discourages users from using BOO rather than calling a Batesville representative

Having conducted stakeholder interviews, I found that there was a pattern of reports that Batesville representatives were being overloaded with calls about orders that could instead be placed in BOO. The task analysis and user interviews revealed why some users were still preferring to call over using the BOO portal.

• The task analysis helped me discover where and what pain points were in the BOO ordering process by showing exactly how users were currently placing orders, where they were getting frustrated, and what they wish could be changed.
• While the task analysis showed how users were currently using the portal, user interviews provided further insight into specific stories or instances in the past that have affected the users' views and willingness to engage with the BOO portal as well as provide further insight into their experience when calling.

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.
• Visual designers brought the wireframes to high fidelity.

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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 the checkout process to do so.

Results:

• This project resulted in a larger deal with Batesville's parent company, Hillenbrand.
• I parted with this project before development, though I were have stayed on, my next steps would have been to complete task analyses with the prototype.
• I had co-wrote and began analyzing the responses of a BOO-focused survey sent out to users.

The Next Steps

Task Analysis & Affinity Mapping

• Conducting a task analysis on the prototype would allow for me to compare the results from the tasks of the orinigal site to the redesign and allow for iteration and hypothesis validation before putting effort and hours into development.
• Affinity mapping responses and results from the survey would help the team better see patterns and themes that develop insights to inform updates and iterations.

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