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Poised as the UX Leader, it was clear some more investigation was needed. The UX team prior made valiant efforts to reduce the time on task with some interface and information architecture updates, but that only slightly softened the blow. Recognizing the existing team did not have the bandwidth to work the project, a fellow hero (contractor) was identified to help with the save.
Research
It was clear that using a superpower like observational research, boosted by a great tool in the utility belt (lookback.io), would get to the bottom of the situtation. 12 brave team members who used the system came forward, selected based on role and experience. Purposefully, the particpants were provided very little context to reduce bias, they were instructed to record their normal course of work. Expecting about 24 hours of video our team members exceeded our expectations providing 40 hours of video to mine for insights.
Outcome
Although there were some issues in the tool, the real time on task thief was a largely external source. In order to find the details for the ordered product to enter and to verify options/limitations the order enterer had to visit an internal wiki and two customer facing sites to find the details, which was compounded by bad product id structure and images that were not optimized for web creating long load times.
As a side project, using the findings/recommendations, another fellow hero (developer) on the internal client team built a small product look up tool that consolidated the product data in one place. The small app put the time on task thief behind the bars of efficiency and the team got a super speed boost.
