Atlas is the internal name for the Discover Financial Services call center software
that agents use to handle customer inquiries and requests. It is a modern UI
wrapper around several disparate systems, including two mainframe core banking
systems that is significantly easier to use and provides a unified UX. In
addition to the call center agents, the system is also used extensively by
back-office banking operations as many of their tasks are far easier to
accomplish in Atlas than with the underlying systems.
Version 1 of Atlas envisioned a dual screen application,
with the left monitor displaying the Know Me screen and
the right showing the Help Me screen.
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| Know Me screen (current) |
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| Help Me screen (current) |
The design
intent was to enable the call center agents to understand
and know their customer from a profile and product mix standpoint. The agent
could then move to the Help Me screen to perform the necessary actions to
resolve the customer call. Unfortunately in practice the system was rarely used
in this manner. Agents tend to immediately jump to problem solving mode and
almost exclusively use the Help Me screen and functions. Additionally, many of
the operations in the system are highly modal, there are many pop-up windows
and dialogs, access to customer actions and account actions are disjoint, and
there is much information that is initially hidden behind many menu choices.
Thus there is goal to redesign Atlas to improve usability
and usage. In addition, DFS is moving to a new technology stack –
HTML/CSS/JavaScript will replace the current Java application - in order to
leverage modern UI and database techniques. I was tasked with developing an
initial version of the potential new design. This is reflected in the
Atlas 2.0 Main screen below (note: downscaling the browser image resulted in
incorrect placement of some checkboxes in the image file).
Key design objectives and improvements:
- Single monitor application
- Display a greater amount of relevant information at the start of the call once the customer has passed the security questions
- Enable multiple customers to be open simultaneously
- Integrate the soft-phone control panel that is currently a separate application
- Improve the visual flow through the screen
- Implement a call task workflow indicator/control via machine listening and AI pattern matching
