UX at the heart of the company – Xebicon

On November 4, the Xebicon was held, an event organized by Xebia (consulting firm specializing in Big Data, Web and Java architecture technologies, but also a member of our alliance).
The objective of this event was to share the experiences acquired by the alliance companies in the field in several different areas of expertise: Digital, Web, DevOps, Cloud, Management 3.0, Architectures and... obviously in User experience!
UX-Republic, represented by Antoine Visonneau (UX-Evangelist and co-founder of the agency) spoke on "UX at the heart of the company" alongside Nicolas Bourgeois, IT Manager domain finance in the ISD of the Global Banking and Investor Solutions within Societe Generale.

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Nicolas Bourgeois and Antoine Visonneau
If you didn't have the chance to attend this presentation, don't worry here is a catch-up session.

UX at the heart of business

The conference led by Antoine and Nicolas presented the work of the UX-Republic and Societe Generale teams as part of the redesign of a BtoE application of the IT department of this Societe Generale division.

Prehistory

Originally, the teams of Nicolas Bourgeois (CIO of this Societe Generale division.) managed "Legacy" applications: applications where no work in user design had been carried out beforehand, which made the applications not very ergonomic and not very visual.
This was explained in particular by the lack of communication between the businesses (users of the application) and the IT project teams.

But the ecosystem has changed and we are now witnessing an evolution in the level of user requirements: We are now all used to using our tablets and smartphones on intuitive, fast and well-designed applications.
Antoine Visonneau, UX-Evangelist @UXRepublic

In addition, the IT department of the IT department of this Societe Generale division experienced a real agile and Continuous delivery transformation which prompted it to take an interest in the work done by web giants such as Google or Amazon and to become aware of the value UX.
The decision that would change everything was then made...
That of bringing in an external company for a first POC aimed at measuring the added value of UX-Design…

Awakening

The intervention of the UX-Republic teams enabled the IT department of the DSI of this division to discover new professions and new approaches.
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On this POC, the UX-Republic and Societe Generale teams worked hand in hand to design a user-centric application where each gesture has a meaning. Task completion time is on average divided by 3 because the processes are streamlined, simplified and intuitive.

The results are therefore very satisfactory: The application has been extremely well received by users won over by the new interface and numerous internal awards have been attributed to this approach.
Nicolas Bourgeois – IT Manager Domain Finance @Societe Generale

Awareness was unanimous...

Industrialization

The "User experience" spread little by little within the IT department: Internal events, integration of UX approaches in new applications... But this UX diffusion lacked a graphic unity so as not to reinvent all the elements each time. .
Societe Generale teams, with the help of UX-Republicans, launched the “FLUX” program with the aim of harmonizing the user experience of applications, reducing costs and risks and increasing the performance and productivity of Users (Users ).
For this, many initiatives have emerged:

  • A Lean UX approach to disseminate the User centric approach on a large scale
  • UX Materials: Abacuses, method sheets and templates, golden rules, html5/Css components and axure…)
  • A change management approach” to raise awareness among all department employees of these issues (workshops, posters, training, etc.)

This approach has been thought out and aligned with the Agile methods implemented within the IT department of the IT department of this Societe Generale division.
The leitmotif of UX-Republic is to support client teams as best as possible in the implementation of UX approaches:

  • We do – We train – We coach
The user-centric company

The IT teams of this department (Societe Generale) have really integrated a user-centric approach in many projects.
The UX was designed and integrated into the “features teams”, through the presence of a UX-Evangelist: The POs, Business Analysts and UX-Evangelists therefore worked together to place the user at the center of the design.

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Antoine Visonneau and Nicolas Bourgeois
A Lean UX approach has been implemented thanks to several design thinking methodologies:

  • THINK : 6 to 1 workshops allowing small groups to reflect on a given subject
  • MAKE : Axure prototyping in order to establish faithful models of the application
  • CHECK : User testing aimed at analyzing user reactions during their use of the application

The intervention of the UX-Republic teams in the structured finance department was fully aligned with the digital transformation that the bank is currently experiencing.
This also made it possible to bring the business teams closer to the IT teams, to set up a more visual way of working (which significantly improved user feedback) but also to establish a project dynamic in the IT teams.

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the founders and partners of UX-Republic
Victoria Pereira – UX-Humanist @UXRepublic