MDMS MAGIC
Client
Amway Corp.
My Role
UX/UI Designer & Researcher
Timeline
6 Months (2022)
Tools
Figma, Adobe Illustrator, Jira
Overview
Redesigned a critical internal platform built for tracking complex financial and enterprise data for over one million global users.
Objective
Modernize and improve Amway's primary internal financial tool, MAGIC, which stands for Managing Awards Growth Incentives Compensation. It is a platform for tracking essential metrics such as sales volume and bonus scheduling. I would have to identify and research the various user personas of the platform and design improvements that would tackle their pain points while making the interface more visually legible and aesthetically pleasing.
Key Challenges
- Determining what to focus on: The given direction to generally improve MAGIC was somewhat vague. User research would help guide the direction, but would also reveal another challenge; there were a variety of user personas with conflicting priorities. How could we satisfy them all, and if not, whom to focus on?
- Organizing a lot of data: MAGIC has an incredible number of accounts with KPIs and financial history spanning years and various countries. Some accounts are even attached to multiple countries.
- Rolling with the punches of corporate priorities: Making use of what is learned even while business priorities and company goals shift.
Context
Amway Corp. is a "direct-sell" or "multi-level-marketing" company. This means there are numerous Amway Business Owners (ABOs) who need their data kept track of so that bonuses can be dished out correctly and rank promotions can be given.
MDMS MAGIC itself lacks documentation and requires a lot of front-loading of knowledge to really understand. Being new to the company and a junior designer, I was going to have to learn how the platform and the company work quickly. Despite being outdated and never updated, MAGIC is incredibly powerful. MAGIC allows its users to access and edit virtually any element of an ABOs account. Amway had good reason to want to improve this existing platform rather than try to replace it with follow-ups.
Alongside me, there were two other designers on this project: another junior designer who started at the same time as me, and a lead designer who generally let us figure things out for ourselves. We also had a person from sales and strategy who could help us get interviews with MAGIC users as well as a primary Subject Matter Expert on MAGIC who would be pivotal in our understanding. In total, there were five of us.
Starting With Research
Before we could redesign MAGIC, we would first have to understand it. That would mean talking to our SME, exploring the interface in a simulated environment, and conducting thorough user research.
Through my own audit, I was immediately able to spot some issues: needlessly complicated navigation, a general lack of information hierarchy, and bizarre choices like inconsistently distributed text links that were colored bright orange on white backgrounds. Fixing these would provide some easy wins, but the real problem-solving would come from the data gathered in interviews with users.
Over the course of 3 months, I helped conduct interviews with users from 7 different countries. I prepared questions and we created a script for getting specific users to walk us through their use cases for MAGIC while we watched on a Microsoft Teams stream. These online interviews provided me with a trove of pain points, testimonies, and personal wishes. Simple card sorting exercises later helped organize the value of both pain points and wishlist items.
The old MAGIC interface, four layers of menus required for some navigation
A figjam board consolidating the many pain points brought to attention.
Pain Points
After interviewing participants from 7+ Markets and collecting over 30 hours of voice recordings to reference (which we never shared with anyone outside of the design team for anonymity purposes, and I never will), a 70+ pain point master list was born.
​
A few of the notable recurring issues were:
- An inability to multitask or complete tasks by having to open multiple instances of MAGIC to look at something while working in another instance of the program.
​
- Having to dig for data that is relevant to their work
- Layers upon layers of menu items to get to certain areas
- Restrictive search functionality
- Inconvenient note-taking for ABO details
MAGIC Had Major Usability Issues and Outdated Features
Some Users Chose AS/400 (IBM i) Systems Over MAGIC
Many Account Managers Using Notepads to Track ABOs
An AS/400 "Green Screen" system. Some MAGIC users were still using these.
A Focus on Account Managers: When grappling with the sheer quantity of pain points and sections of MAGIC that needed to be overhauled to satisfy the concerns of our users, we concluded that most of it lined up with the Account Manager experience. They were the primary users. This persona became a natural starting place.
The Settings modal for adjusting displayed content in the Volumes tab of a user.
Designing for Big Data
MDMS MAGIC is incredibly information-dense, so it comes as no surprise so much of the feedback was related to accessing or adding to that data.
One of the first and most impactful design changes we introduced was my personal pet feature. Tabs. This is something that I insisted on after having personally spent some time working for a bank and using a similar kind of software. The ability to open multiple tabs and jump between screens without having to completely reload the software or open multiple instances of it that can cause desnych is invaluable and fixes the multitasking complaints.
After a lot of effort trying to determine what info should be front and center on an ABO's dashboard or a given KPI tab, we came to conclusion that adding a way to customize what information is shown for a given user of MAGIC would actually be best. This personalized table system was ultimately added to our living design system and used elsewhere after MAGIC.
Finding given ABOs was also made much easier as search was improved to allow for searching by names, and partial information rather than requiring a single hard-coded ABO number. We also introduced a convenient immediate ability to see and add notes to an ABO's dashboard upon landing, which would allow for custom data to be added for any ABO without forcing MAGIC users to rely on personal notepads or documents.
Prototyping & Pitching
I prepared a prototype for a demo of what the new experience could look like for our stakeholders.
The prototype was split into two parts to demonstrate two immediate user experiences, one being the common account management user, and the other being an admin-level Manager of Account Managers (MoAM). First, the user "Carl" creates a sponsorship change request for "Jane Berry" after locating her profile within MAGIC. Then, admin "Neera Greera" approves the request from Carl.
Project Crossover & Shifting Company Priorities
Unfortunately, in the corporate world, for one reason or another, decisions are often made to alter, shelve, or completely cut initiatives even after they have shown promise or a lot of the work has been completed.
​
In the case of the MAGIC redesign, it was a mix of shelving and alteration. Amway corporate decided it could survive with its outdated system a bit longer, and had been running a couple of similar projects elsewhere within the company that nobody really realized were cannibalizing one another. The work on MAGIC would be preserved, but would not be implemented until a later date.
On the bright side the project crossover meant a lot of the work that I had done would still find its way into use as the research was transferable, and the UI components were useful. One concrete use of the research that I can tell you about is an effort to create a journey map that maps the experience of an Account Manager at Amway...
Interactive Journey Map
Using the data from our MAGIC research as well as 9 months woth of other data collected on Account Managers from other projects,my lead had the idea to compile everything we had regarding the Account Manager job into one big interactive journey map. It was my responsibility to turn this idea into a reality using Figma. I created a clickable prototype that illustrates the month-to-month cyclical workflow of Amway's AMs.
The final version includes the tasks, tools, emotions, pain points, needs, and opportunities that make up the monthly cycle of Account Manager work.
Post Mortem
This was one of the first major initiatives I worked on as a professional designer. Sure, I had worked on more complex projects at school, and I had taken care of smaller assignments such as ecommerce checkouts or website audits professionally, but this was the first time I had been involved in the software from the start in a paid setting.
I learned a lot about the pace things move at, and how a lot of hands on a project, sometimes completely unseen, can change the trajectory of a body of work.
​
If I could do anything differently... I think I would push more for finding ways to prove the value of this work early and make it clear that it ought to reach a 1.0 state. That may have been more the responsibility of my lead or director, but it's something I could have contributed to, but did not yet understand how important it was. From a visuals and branding perspective, I have a bone to pick with whomever in marketing made the MAGIC (acronym) logo all lowercase for our redesign. It's really confusing and I hate that, but I didn't really push on that or worry enough about the aesthetics as I could've.
In the end though, my favorite thing about this project was that I am still in contact with just about everyone who worked on it with me, and I love that.