Account Preference Center

UX Design
Project Overview
This project was to create a new page to allow users to manage their subscriptions to email, sms, postal and telephone communications from the client company.

The need for this page had arisen due to a change in legislation governing these communication channels.
Project Challenges
Because of the legal aspect to the project, and the risk of enforcement action if the project was done incorrectly there were a lot of internal stakeholders.

The challenge in this project was gathering requirements correctly, and despite working almost entirely with business stakeholders delivering a design that remained human centered.

It was imperative that I delivered a design that met all the legal requirements and satisfied all business stakeholders, but there would have been no point to the resulting page if a customer wasn’t then able to understand how to use it to actually do anything.
Research
Early on in the project, I made time to sit down with the client’s legal team and establish a list of elements that they expected to be on the page. After a long discussion we clarified that their main focus was on the nature of the copy, rather than on the specific user inteface elements that were presented.
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That gave me some freedom to explore different approaches to the structure of the page. To help guide that process, I used site analytics to understand how users browsed, and browsed between, pages next to this page in the proposed site heirarchy.
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The results from the analytics were insightful, and to help play them back to the very invested project team I ended up constructing three user personas. As part of the persona building process I discovered that the client team already had some existing marketing personas and was able to tie the two sets together.
Design
I explored a couple of different design directions in my exploratory paper sketching, but eventually found that they all converged on a card centered design. It rapidly became clear that this was the most natural fit for the design problem.

Most of the challenge in the design was in coming up with the detailed structure of the cards themselves, so thats where a lot of the early iteration took place. After going through several versions on paper, I worked up the two best examples into low-res wireframes to present back to the project team.
Playback
The client playback session for this project was more complex than normal. There were a lot of people in the room who weren’t used to making decisions about an in-progress website. 
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The focuss of the project was the necessary elements for legal compliance. To help prevent the discussion from getting caught up into presentational details, I chose to avoid working up high-res wireframes or visual mock-ups and presented only low-resolution wireframes showing just the core elements of the design.
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By grounding the presentation in the user personas I’d worked up in my research phase, I was able to clearly communicate the necessary elements design and proposed page structure.

The personas in particular helped me explain my design decisions in the context of actual user needs, and that helped me convince the room to go with a human centered design direction.
The playback session was a success and this design was selected for further development through visual design and eventual implementation and delivery.