You’re so SaaS-y!
Historically OpenMarket was an API based company in the business of SMS aggregation with true white-glove customer service. In an effort to expand their offerings they wanted to create a best-in-class self-service cloud software that would open up our services and connections to a whole new market. As the sole UX designer, this was a Goliath of a task so I teamed up with a couple of UX consultants from our parent company to complete the task.
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The discovery process was really fun because it was starting from square 1. We needed to interview customers, internal stakeholders, and subject matter experts. We conducted workshops with everyone and built a lot of buy in from different areas of the company and customers. We reviewed competitors and other self service communication tools to better understand the results that they came up with.
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After several workshops and information synthesis, we defined several personas as well as user flows. We created the most complex user flow that a customer might need in order to cover several use cases in one.
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Design began with simple sketches, and low-fi wireframes in order to explain the flow to other teams and stakeholders. Once we had a clear vision we created a prototype to test with customers and get feedback on the flow. I have always found this to be one of the most important aspects of design is the validation and understanding if we are on the right track with real users. This is when we get the AH HA! moments that shape the future development so we truly make a valuable product.
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With speed being a defining pillar of this design we opted to use google material design for the high fidelity designs. This made for quick and easy decisions on what components to use and ensure we are up-to-date with trends and modern design.
Benchmarking against our competitors. Some of them are direct competition however others just do a damn good job at similar concepts that we wanted to create.
1 of the 2 personas, the campaign manager was an important role that surfaced after interviewing our customers. This position was a representation of our customers need to have a wholistic look at our product vs an everyday implementer of campaigns. They may organize and set up the structure to support the business goals.
The campaign implementer was an important role that surfaced after several interviews with our customers and understanding how they use our current products and how they use some of our competitive products that we were interested in replacing.
No UX portfolio would be complete without the obligatory post it notes on a whiteboard. This workshop was to help us understand our business KPI's and the ideal customer journey.
This was the resulting ideal customer journey to sign up.
Final results
The final result concluded with high fidelity designs that utilized Google Material Design with our own color pallet. This was a smart solution in order to get customer feedback on flow, usability, ease of use, and charge forward with creating new features and expanding our offering. We created and tested our prototype and made updates to the design that were later implemented. After creating the new customer portal we chose to redesign with a new design system. You will see that process next!