Spotter: Triggering Success

The conflict

In 2017, the company was losing customers to competitors who offered similar products but with an extra tool: They are sending scheduled emails. In addition, investors noticing this market movement made us a requirement as a condition for a new investment round. We need to find a way for our product to send emails by triggers.

The mission

If we failed, our company would fall behind competitors who already had this capability, or worse, we could lose the investment. The pressure was enormous, so I felt both excited and anxious. My challenge was to design a tool for creating and sending emails, to be delivered to developers within two months

My Role

As a Senior UX designer, I worked for two developer teams, conducting research and designing interfaces.

My resposabilities

• Validate the market's need for an email campaign tool
• Validation of technical capacity
• User flows
• Wireframes and high-quality prototypes

Challenges faced

• Lack of know-how about email campaign systems
• Short dead-line
• Hight interactive prototype was required

Result: 137% contracts increased

• We launched the new feature during an important event where the company expected to close up to 8 sales. However, 19 contracts were dealt with. The result was attributed to the evolution of the product with new features and a new design.
• The company became a market leader, doubling its size for two years in a row
• A new investment was made at the end of the year
• CEO, Theo Orosco, released the book "from 0 to 50 Million" telling the story of Exact's (Exact Sales) rapid and amazing growth

Strategy and 
Research

Outlining scopes

With a short time to research in-depth, I decided to do it online to analyze competitors and prepare myself for running interviews. Soon after, I interviewed five clients/partners and the company's board of directors.

My goals were

• Understand what an email campaign tool is, what it is for and how it works
• Deeply understand the user needs and how urgent it is for our company
• Reveal the "users pain point" and identify opportunities
• Determine what would be the minimum acceptable that our product should have to please users.

Enterviews

The interviews were more like conversations, but I aimed to answer the following questions:

• How important is it today to have a tool that automates the sending of emails?
• How do they do it today?
• What do you expect from a great email campaign tool?
• Do you think it's worth investing a little more in Spotter so that it has a new automated email tool?

Discoveries and Ideas

Contrary to what I imagined, specialized tools for email campaigns are expensive and unfeasible for small and medium-sized companies - our target. In general, our customers need a simple tool, which alleviates the workload and frees up the pre-salesperson for other activities considered more critical.

Putting all the pieces together and deciding what to do

After gathering a lot of information, it was time to shape the project scope.

Strategic and Design Decisions

Why are these tools expensive? What's the minimum required to create a satisfying email campaign? These were essential and decisive questions in our project. From these questions, we decided to make an MVP with limited emails, however, at no extra cost to the customer. Of course, if the tool had good acceptance, we would lift the limit and charge an additional amount in new versions.

As a design decision, I defined the product would have the minimum necessary for an email campaign: Contact List + Template and a campaign creation mechanism that combined the mentioned items with the Time variable (schedule).

• The Email Campaign will be limited due to the operational cost
• High-fidelity prototypes will be made for quick validation directly with customers
• We will make a "control group" running BETA version with 5 clients / partners will have direct communication with the design team
• We will release the functionality with the minimum necessary for sending scheduled emails (MVP)
• It should be more straightforward than the evaluated competitors

Job To Be Done

"When I have a lot of contacts that are not 'ready' yet,
I want to 'nourish' them with useful information via email,
So I can get in touch as soon as the spotter points out a good score."

User Flow

Sketches

Wireframe

_Dashboard

_New Campaign

Design and 
Solution

Visual Style Guide and Design System

Below we can see the visual style guide created by a third-party service. The design team created components giving rise to the design system. The Design System was created by the team, in weekly meetings

It is very important to make this very clear. At the same time, other projects were taking place and being conducted by other designers. Each project contributed new elements, components and behaviours to the design library we built TOGETHER. Therefore, the pieces shown here served for several projects and were made by me but discussed with the team and often improved by colleagues. And that's how things go when you have a good team.

Thanks Milena and Daniel.

Basic Elements

I put it here for you to take a look

Interactions (samples)

I created those interaction on figma in order to develop my skills on prototyping.

Interactive Prototype (Axure-rp)

We built high-fidelity prototypes on Axure with good interaction levels. This way, we could use it in costumers meetings presentations. Plus, we could not wait for the entire development cycle to show customers how it would work.

Before moving on, a conflict was faced

Importantly, I faced resistance from colleagues when presenting a simple proposal. They expected something more complete like the competitors. But if there's something I've learned over time, it's that new products should start simple and give the user a chance to learn and follow the evolution of the product in its complexity.

The directors supported, and the project continued with the promise of evolutions. But, first, we would launch a Beta test.

Learnings