About the Company
Tenfold is a series B startup company based on Austin, Texas. The company provides a native app to connect with the customer's CRMs (i.e. Salesforce) and the phone systems into a single unified view, which helps to reduce clicks, speed up the process, and present data so customers can quickly build rapport with the person they are speaking to.
MY ROLE
UX Design
User Research
User Testing
DELIVERABLES
Interactive Prototype
High Fidelity Mocks
DURATION
3 Months
Context
I worked at Tenfold San Francisco office as contractor UX Designer for 3 months. During the 3 months, my work at Tenfold involved interaction design, user research, and user testing. My first project at Tenfold was to design the most frequently-requested feature — Design creating tasks, event and task management experience.
Problem Findings
It's important to understand sales agents and support agents’ habits and preference before I jump into design solutions. There were two types of research were conducted to identify users’ pain points about create tasks experience and task management experience.
User observations
I visited our Austin office where all of our sales agents and support agents located. I observed six agents – three support agents and three sales agents. For each of the agents, I observed for one hour to ask questions, see how they use Tenfold to create tasks, assign tasks and also monitor how they use Tenfold naturally.
Agents use Outreach, Google Calendar, Google sheet, and Salesforce for task management.
Data Analysis
By working with our data analytics, we found out our natural language process in the notes area is almost not being used at all. There is only 0.75% user NLP to create tasks and log notes.
The Problems
- NLP(Natural Language Process) is almost not being used at all
Due to the low discoverability, the majority of our users don' use NLP to log notes and create tasks at all. The existing software forces users to use NLP(Natural Langue Process) to assign tasks, creates events and log notes, e.g., "+" is for adding an assignee, "//" is for pick up a date, "[ ]" is for creating a task and an event, etc. It's like having agents write code to log a note. Also, it requires a longer learning curl. So we need a much simpler log notes experience, which allows users easily to assign a task, tag people, and create a follow up with the customer.
- Agents need additional tools for task management
After users create tasks, they need to go to Salesforce other task management software for the following step.
- Lack of clarity about what kind of tasks being created.
- Users can only notify 1 person at any given time.
Design Goals
The goal of this project is to make sure sales agents and support agents can easily to assign a task, create an event, and mention other agents for any type of follow-up while they’re logging notes for the customer. Also it allows them to complete the task inside our app. So that agents are not only keep keep track every customers all the time, but also they don’t necessary go to all kind of CRMs or tools, which helps users to reduce clicks, speed up the process, and present data so users can spend more time focus on building customer relationships.
- Allow Event and Task creation in the Notes area without NLP.
- In-app task management experience. Reduce clicks and lowering users reliance on dozens of windows and tabs.
- Users can see exactly what's being created. It follows the agent's mental model for establishing similar events and tasks.
Ideation, Flow model, and Iteration
After understanding the problems, I began with the ideation process. I sketched out some of the most promising ideas to distill them down and also to get feedback from the team. I focused on one design opportunities and crafted a new workflow. I drew a flow model to understand the create tasks, events, and task management flow. This helped me to gain a better understanding of the entire process. This phase was pretty short, and I transitioned to digital mocks once I figured out the major directions.
Validation
I presented the prototype to our users. For each user, I walked through the design catered to their needs. I also presented the major alternative design direction. I asked the users about the interaction presented and their general impression. After each feedback session, I shared the result with the team and incorporated the changes.
- Write testing plans
To save participants time and be more productive, I always write testing plan before-hand. When I'm writing the testing plan, I'll try to be task oriented. Give one or a few tasks for users to do. When the user is completing the task, I can observe how they are doing, any difficulty they encountered.
- Setup testing
Schedule for testing is always a hassle. I'll try to limit the testing session around 30mins-1hour and invited participants to Zoom meeting for a screen recording.
During the testing session, I'll make sure I'm not leading the questions and allow participants to think out loud.
- Write test reports & Share result to the team& Iteration
Test reports are a great way to further explain the testing feedback other designers, PM, and stakeholders. After the user testing, I'll clean up my notes and arrange them into a report. It's not only helped me to iterate the design based on the user testing feedback. But also is a great way to showcase value to the product manager, engineers, and stakeholders.
Final Design
Add tasks, events with simple clicks
It's super fast and easy to add tasks, events with simple clicks. Agents can enter their task's subject and content on one page, including due date, assignees, due time and more.
Get reminded, in-app.
Agents don't need all kinds of CRMs and Task Management tools. They can simply review and complete the tasks in the app. Agents will never lose track of the customer's status.
Other Highlights
I also worked on some side projects for Tenfold, such as Drop launcher feature; Activity enhancement. etc.
Activity Enhancement
During the user observation, I found out the majority of users don’t use activity feature, which is due to the old activity section was pretty visually cluttered, activity notes do not expand, and also the key customer interactions are difficult to find though.
I wanted to design a cleaner solution and make it future-proof, So I added the functionally which each long activity events can expand, allowed users can filter out unnecessary events from their activity feed so that they can easily and quickly to find the key customers information, and also I made visual improvements.
What I learned
Tenfold is my second startup company. Here’s the one thing that is true about every startup: No one really knows what will happen. No one knows what the next step will be. Startups are all about hustling. So we need to keep improving our product and service our work diligently through ideation, design, prototyping, validation, and iteration.