Sales Analytics Platform Product Design

Client: InsightSquared | Via: InsightSquared

EXECUTION

Product Design • UX • Visual Design • Research • SaaS

ROLE

Sr. Product Designer

Engagement

Full-time Design IC

Project Objectives

UX, Interaction, Interface & Product Design

Using machine learning, we automatically capture, integrate and analyze every activity throughout the sales process to give our customers unprecedented visibility into how to optimize their sales process. IS2 calculates winning deal profiles, clearly identifying what great looks like, when to coach, where to drive improvement, and how to create long-term competitive advantages by visualizing data & analytics.

As lead product designer, my role in maintaining the product is to balance complex functionality and usability, with focus on the customer experience. Since this was a redesign, we had to uphold the users expectations combined with their previous interaction with the product.

Objectives

Maintain the credibility of the product
Improve adoption rate
Encourage return visits (daily usage)
Maintain customer service and satisfaction
Influence social, viral and word of mouth marketing
Lead to a Return on the investment (ROI)

USERS

Our Target Users

We identified our target users as sales leaders and their teams. Specifically, CROs and revenue teams. User personas were provided by PO, PM, UX Researcher. Our company has been in business for 10+ years and the target users have varied only slightly in that time. Luckily, we have an in-house sales team that includes all of our target personas. I can lean on them when I need to quickly validate some assumpitons or decisions.

A key persona trait we shifted our attention to over the course of development, was on technical ability. We determined that guidance and contextual help would be a key to driving adoption of the product into a salesteam’s workflow.

Project Role

Project Role & Leadership

I function as a lead design manager on this product, working closely with the Chief Product Officer, Project Manager and 10 engineers.

I joined the team with one other designer on staff at the time. 3 months after joining, the other product designer resigned to pursue another opportunity. I became the sole designer for a product suite supported by a 150 person team. Soon after, we acquired another startup and planned to integrate their machine learning fpr sales actions with the dashboard analytics in our core product. My directive would be to develop a new design and UX to bring a cohesive experience to these two products.

I maintained daily interaction with the Project manager and Engineering team to assist in grooming requirements, and to provide updates and deliverables for epics and stories. My responsibility in the sprint process was to stay a couple of weeks ahead of any work the engineering had in flight.

I developed a system to manage the design process from design, to review, to hand-off, through Jira. We also set up a process using Zeplin to provide design visuals and specs to the development team for all design related assets.

Design Process

End-to-End Design Process

Most features were planned and strategized by the CPO and PM before they brought me in to discuss the plan of action around assesing UX and design needs. It was my responsibility to take the functional requirements, refine them with the PM through sketches, wireframing and prototypes, evaluate the ux and the solution in regards to how it solves the feature problem, produce deliverables in proof-of-concept for stakeholders or the leadership team, or hand-off design specs to the engineering team.

For example, we wanted to improve the functionality, usability and feature set of one of older products — a sales forecasting module. I needed to understand the essential workflow of the product to start and identifying that process started with a flow map. This help give us a 500 ft view of the key touch points.

This also allowed us to compare our current solution to other products in our space. Looking at our existing product from this view, we were able to map out changes, additions and other fixes to the product. I worked up a journey map to document what we believed to be the current experience for our users based on this phase of research.

Product flow map

Journey Map

Distilling our takeaways, we moved into more visual ideation from there. We wanted to validate proposed design solutions against our initial research to quickly determine where the solution may not improve the problem areas.We iterated on the wireframes until we had covered any holes.

Once we were satisfied we had an 80 – 90% solution, we moved in to hi-fidelity visual design to put a face on the wireframes. This phase would also typically include any necessary interaction demos or prototyping if we really needed to flesh out the full experience.

Wireframe

“Blue Sky” design

RESEARCH

User Research

For the most part, we relied on assumptions about our existing customer personas to guide most of our decisions for the direction of the product initially. About 6 months into the relaunch, I wanted to better understand the essential work our product seeks to solve for customers and a way to present an objective report to my stakeholders and leadership team. I set up several rounds of interviews with both internal and external users to collect their input on where has the platform improved the customers user experience, where it is adequate and where its failing. We asked each group to share their experience with the product over the last 6 months or so if possible. We wanted to hear general attitudes as a baseline, in reaction to the overall changes that have been made to the product.

The deliverable from this research was an empathy report. This doc allowed me to help my Product Manager and my Product Owner prioritize upcoming work and our feature roadmap.

Depending on the needs of the project, some of the criteria we use to decide how we go about collecting and validating feedback would include:

When possible, get input from the users (surveys)
Understand their pain points (interviews)
What are your user’s expectations of how the product should address their needs
(Jobs to Be Done)
Are the features and functionality of the product suited to the capabilities of the target audience (call reviews)

Visual Design

Feature Level Design

One feature we developed for the product that lead to a big win with our users early-on, was the front-end editing feature we added to our dashboards.

A key selling point of our redesigned product is dashboards. By condensing multiple reports down into visuals, such as graphs charts, tables, and metrics, and displaying those visuals in a single, simple view, our dashboards would allow our customers to review valuable information at a glance.

The initial iteration of the dashboards required users to execute any edits or modifications to the arrangement of a dashboard on a separate screen — the board editor. Though the board editor was powerful an intuitive, it was disruptive to the flow of reviewing and analyzing reports. Any time a user wanted to reorganize what they were looking at, perhaps to group related metrics to help better tell a story, they would have to open the board editor and reorganize cards using a miniature representation of the dashboard layout. This controlled placements in rows, widths of cards, even the data populating the cards themselves.

Side panel dashboard editor – originally users went to this panel to reorganize or resize dashboard cards

We had a few key objectives with this effort:

Create an aesthetic for functionality and interaction
Create a UI that guides and assists the user
Visually organize content and data
Create an engaging visual experience
Create an invisible UI

The resulting solution created streamlined interaction that allowed for uninterrupted workflow in the dashboard reporting view. Focusing on a single-screen-driven workflow enabled rapid dashboard and metric card management, even on the most dense boards. Users welcomed the elimination of the need to manually move between dashboard and the board editor to accomplish their tasks.

Spec for handle hover

Mouse-down hover highlight

Drag-to-resize interaction spec

Finish state

Drag interaction demo

Results

Platform Growth

From acquisition, product consolidation starting Oct 19 through Q4 2020: 136% growth after releasing the entire platform redesign, feature updates, and UX improvements.

Improved User Experience with the decrease in administrative cost by 73%.
Enhanced UI improved user engagement by 88%.
63% account adoption rate after our launching dashboard UX and feature improvements.
NPS is up 33%.

Intuitive experience with clearer functional visibility.
Improved navigation reducing the help needed from the customer service and implemetation teams.
Better experience and improved functionality of the product overall leading to higher value contract engagements..

Just off a call with a pretty influential consultant – “I have to say I love your UI. The colors are easy on my eyes. Nice tones”

– Chief Marketing Officer