Problem:
The business had long term goals to meet and a high level idea of how they would like to improve to achieve them. Without having established design processes or internal design resources, the client was looking for guidance in many different areas of the business and maturing their design practice.
Solution:
Over the course of this engagement, we tackled areas of high importance to the business such as understanding the national mobile usage/process through user research, continual salesforce platform design improvements, evaluating their current Seismic content platform and gaining insights on needs of their users.
Because of the innovative work delivered and the relationships created with the stakeholders on this engagement, the client is currently working on expanding the partnership. Planning is in progress for next years roadmap of work and extending the contract of the team past the original date which will allow us to continue making transformative change for what's possible today for the organization.
Technology used:
Sketch, Salesforce, Seismic (sales enablement platform)
Client:
Global investment management company
Users:
Internal and external wholesalers in charge of creating and maintaining relationships with financial institutions to increase sales. Management in charge of creating sales initiatives for users and monitoring the health of the pipeline.
Responsibilities:
- Gaining a deep knowledge of the existing Salesforce and Seismic systems as well as the design systems they use and identifying opportunities of growth
- Understanding our clients goals for desktop and mobile, their branding and the individuals using their software
- User interviews with tasks including script creation, facilitation of sessions, readout deck creation/presentation
- Facilitation of importance difficulty matrix creation with the business and team of developers to help plan a roadmap resulting from interview findings
- Strategic decision making and prioritization of tasks to follow a business roadmap and ensure on time delivery of work
- Education of best practices for design and internal process with key stakeholders of all levels of design knowledge to elevate the way they work
- Taking broad ideas from the client and users then turning them into innovative new features starting from wireframes into high-fidelity screens
- Iterating on the interactions and UI of existing application features creating the next generation of their visual system. Typography, layout, iconography, color and functionality all being reviewed
- Consideration of scalability for our global users, differences in data for different areas of the business and accessibility
- Collaborating with developers during the agile design process to ensure feasibility
- Creation of flows to visualize new features and current process
- Prototyping screens to better illustrate the final process
- Presentation of ideas and finished work to get signoff from stakeholders and get buy in from other high level management
- Building and maintaining trusting relationships with our cross-disciplinary team and stakeholders
- Planning the user testing of features, script creation, facilitation and readout creation
- Beginning stages of heuristic analysis of existing pages: understanding and prioritizing key user tasks, gaining understanding of business goals
- Owning the handoff of high fidelity designs and follow through of design QA throughout the development process
Areas of work:
1. Mobile usage and process
Goal: To gain an understanding of how users on the road are utilizing their company phones and iPad; what are the positives, pain points and use cases. How are they being used for meeting prep, customer follow up and how can we take these learnings and cater our systems and hardware to the needs of the users.
Interviews: 13 users, in three different roles located across the country.
Deliverables: A readout deck and importance difficulty matrix was created to assist in planning upgrades and getting company buy in from executive management.
2. Salesforce upgrades
Goal: Gaining a holistic view of platform usage/performance through evaluations of current processes and engagement in the system. We then wanted to take those findings and solve problems by making improvements using custom design to allow for elevated efficiency and improved connection with customers.
Our process: Design brief creation to outline streams of work, user interviews, synthesis and readout presentation, flow creation of existing and ideal process, prioritizing, design, iteration, prototype creation, feature testing with users, development handoff and implementation
2.A - Business campaigns:
What is a business campaign? A planned campaign used for better tracking of leads and efforts in the system. They contain valuable data that wholesalers can use to optimize their time and future efforts. General searches help them plan their day and surface critical contacts to reach out to.
Goal: See how wholesalers were currently using campaigns in their sales process and to see if other software like excel were being used. We wanted to learn how we could improve salesforce to better cater to their needs and desired workflow. This would lead to more data being kept in the system, increased productivity, improved usefulness of the tool and increased sales.
Interviews: A script was created to review the users process and 4 interviews were conducted. A readout deck and importance difficulty matrix was created to assist in planning upgrades and getting company buy in from executive management.
Business Campaign Improvements: An unused feature was upgraded for upper management to better create campaigns in Salesforce. Four user journeys were created to visualize the current and ideal process
New ways to add users to a campaign - Method one - Upload a spreadsheet of desired users and the system would cross match existing salesforce users and then input them into the new campaign. Method two - Do a search in the system and refine the results to find and add additional users.
Field clean up and additions - The form to enter campaign details was refined to eliminate unnecessary data and improve ease of creation. Additional fields were added to give wholesalers acting on the campaign more details on a desired action also a start and end date to make sure efforts were made in a relevant timeframe.
New approval process - We added an approval process so the managers of the wholesalers could agree that the campaign was valuable for their people to spend their time on. This digitized the current verbal possess that was in place. The two parties would have a conversation to discuss the campaign and if it was valuable. Now comments can be added in the tool, a back and forth can still happen but the process becomes digital and quicker.
UI Upgrades - Attention was paid to the visual design of the UI elements to upgrade the look and feel of the system using the newer salesforce designs with a more modern look and feel. Usability updates were also done to improve the process.
Add Users with Excel upload
Add Users by searching and refining
View all contacts Added
Add Details to the campaign
Review different types of campaigns
Track approval status of your submitted campaign
2.B - Opportunities
What are Opportunities? A system for revenue pipeline management. Users can create opportunities to track deal stages in the sales pipeline. Additional information would be added throughout the process to progress it as it matures. This data would then be used in forecasting by managers all the way up to the CFO and CEO.
Problem: Opportunities aren't updated on a regular basis resulting in them going delinquent and the pipeline reporting being inaccurate This could be billions of dollars in inaccuracy. The business would then be making important decisions with outdated numbers.
Solution: Our upgrades increase usability and make it easier for users to progress opportunities through the stages. This increased productivity will better track the inflow and outflow of investments in the pipeline, allow for more accurate tracking of funds, enable users to better attempt to save clients from pulling out money and make the reporting more accurate for C-Suite decision making.
User journeys: Four were created to visualize the current and ideal process
Opportunities Improvements
Added data: Helpful data was added like estimated date and probability of closing, a new stage to track at the beginning of the process when certainty of closing is lower. The more data and information you have in the system, the less questions and unnecessary interactions there are.
Manager weigh in: Giving the sales manager the ability to weigh in and score an opportunity with a percent certainty of closing. Currently there are weekly meetings with each employee, taking up unnecessary time.
Addition of ‘Flows’ opportunity type: If you didn’t actively participate in the search and a business selected you to receive additional flows which are not yet funded but the money will come in. Leads to better tracking of money in and out with a reduced form for input.
Adding more education elements: Addition of tooltips and definitions of each stage and what is needed to progress to each one. New widget of useful knowledge articles on opportunity pages
UI Upgrades:
1. A nested button was added on the organization page to make it easier to create an opportunity, business at risk and ‘flows’.
2. New tabbed approach for better progression through the process.
3. Evaluation of widget placement. To improve the use of space we moved important widgets out of nested tabs onto the main page and ones that are seldom used into a tabbed widget
4. Visual design and usability overhaul was done to upgrade the look and feel of the system in areas for selecting products and team members, searching and refining results. Newer salesforce components were used with a more modern look and feel while also balancing using custom code to cut down on development time.
Testing: We tested a prototype of the new designs with different types of users to gain feedback on design upgrades and updates to the process. A prototype and script was created, sessions were held and a readout was created.
Presentation and developer handoff: The prototype was presented to key business leaders and we received great feedback on the new designs upgrades and improved usability. Screens were also presented to the development team to get them prepared for their upcoming work.
Create and new opportunity and add details
Add team members
Search and select related products
Create opportunity and progress it through the stages
View related knowledge articles
2.C - General Salesforce upgrades
Throughout the project, additional updates were prioritized, designed and developed to improve the general use of existing functions. Some of the areas designed include: better functionality and UI of activity filtering, cloning prior meeting notes in a new meeting, screens integrating ON24 data from webcasts into the system, recurring cases field integration and evaluation
3. Seismic evaluation and upgrades
In our research we heard that users were having trouble finding necessary content in the system which is integral to their job. Also, the original system they were using was easier to use but was being decommissioned at the end of the year. We evaluated how the system was serving up content and what changes would be helpful to users and feasible in the very limited design suite the system offers out of the box.