Client Interaction Timeline (2023)
My role
Project timeline
Product Design Team Lead
January - March 2023
B2B SaaS for Regulatory Compliance: Focusing on End Users
Hearsay is a digital marketing platform for financial services that uses analytics to help financial advisors to automate marketing tasks.
We had a suite of products that included:
(1) social networking services,
(2) financial advisor websites,
(3) compliance-friendly messaging, and
(4) email, all ways for clients to market to various customer bases.
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The Securities and Exchange Commission regulates how financial advisors and insurance agents are allowed to communicate with consumers. Hearsay Systems provides a platform that ensures its users’s compliance in messaging, social media posts, and professional sites when communicating with prospects, leads, and clients.
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This project had two types of end users in mind: financial advisors and insurance agents.
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User Research Findings
A year prior, our team administered a month-long diary study (user logs of daily activities as they occur given contextual insights about real-time user behaviors and needs, helping define UX feature requirements) with 10 users to understand their long-term behavior, experiences, and goals. We had heaps of learnings coming out of that research project. Two most important user insights from this research for this project were:
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(1) One of the most important ways for our users to grow their relationships with prospects, leads and clients is by connecting with clients on a personal level during meetings, and
(2) Our end users's workflow for preparing for client meetings was painful and highly inefficient: when an end user prepared for a client meeting, they first visit their customer relationship management software (i.e., Salesforce), then navigate between different Hearsay products, and often, also dig through handwritten notes on previous calls.
So I set out to simplify the following part of the workflow that lived in Hearsay:
How Might We...
...make it easier for our users to prepare for their meetings so that they can better growing their relationship with their clients?
Defining Success
I ran a cross-functional workshop, including the PM, compliance, go-to-market, and engineer leads to clarify expectations for this project and align on goals. The outcome of that workshop translated into 3 key design principles that, with the collaboration of the PM, eventually became product requirements.
Key Design Principles
Product Requirements
1. Tell a story. Provide a story of what the user’s relationship with the client has been so far. Paint a picture. The story should make it obvious whether this client has required high touch or low touch, what this client’s main concerns or motivations have been for working together, and what personal information is important to follow up on.
1. A timeline that includes client interactions important for understanding the nature of the relationship and how to carry it forward.
2. Provide hierarchy of information. Allow users to convey hierarchy of information in their documentation so that they will not have to wade through all notes in order to discern what’s important, and can gather the most important information at a glance.
2. Allow users to distinguish between more and less important information in their documentation with the highlighting feature.
3. Don't overwhelm. Advisors often don’t have time to make elaborate documentation. We should provide easy to use, programmatic options with customization as an option, not a necessity.
3. Group or hide information not pertinent to task of preparing for the next client meeting, such as repetitive programmatic content, or data points outside the relevant timeline.
In short, we wanted the user to be able to prepare for a client meeting without having to navigate away from the messaging page, and simplify the workflow to eliminate the need for users to visit different Hearsay products and consult hand-written notes:
Iterations & User Testing
Through multiple rounds of rapid prototyping and user testing, I learned what type of content needs to live on the timeline, and where the timeline should live on in the messaging experience.
Issue surfaced through user testing: Content
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Transactional summaries overlapped with information users already have access to in their CRM (e.g., Salesforce). Users needed a way to log their call notes so they can follow up on the more personal side of previous conversations.
Issue surfaced through user testing: Too much real estate
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Persistent timeline was not an efficient use of screen real estate for users with 100+ clients, most of whom have minimal and mainly transactional relationships with the user.
Issue surfaced through user testing: Too little real estate
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While the widget gave real estate back and creates the possibility that client interactions can exist on any page, it didn't provide enough room for users to easily glance over the last few weeks of call notes.
Final Design
Outcome
The impact of reducing our end users's workflow was enormously successful. Small experiments were considered successful if they achieved a 10 - 15% adoption rate. This redesign project was a dramatic improvement that saw 21% adoption rate of in the first three months. User feedback via surveys was overwhelmingly positive.
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Looking back, the most critical thing to the success of this project was this particular team's relentless efforts towards achieving cross-functional alignment between design, product, and eng. We worked hard to frame and reframe the problem until there was clarity to all, ideated together, and stayed open to feedback from both users and colleagues.
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If you'd like to see more in depth process or hear more about my experience, drop me a line at ariane.lejian.pan@gmail.com