ACCOUNT HQ

User Experience, Visual Design, Web Design, Mobile App Design

Account HQ (now known as Sales Canvas) is an AI-powered Sales Enterprise CRM (Web App) to help sales people make data entry more efficient. 

 Impact & Results: 

• Increased customer base by 35% by executing 8 new, high-demand features designed from lo to hi-fi, now live on the app
• Improved efficiency of the product by increasing glanceability, accuracy and speed of tasks accomplished by 50%
• Aligned team on vision by establishing a new workflow system and strategizing between developers, CEO & stakeholders 
• Spearheaded new iterations weekly to meet customer demands in an agile setting 
• Ideated new mobile app and presented and pitched app during Collision conference (Toronto's biggest tech conference)

 The problem: Salespeople spend too much time entering information into CRM when they could be out making sales.

The solution: Create an AI powered sales assistant that autofills information, reminds salespeople of leads and suggests strategic next steps

My role: I was the only UX Designer, Researcher, and Strategist and carried out the top to bottom process. I worked on this project for three months along with 3 developers, 1 CEO, and 2 stakeholders. I designed several new features, improved workflows and usability of the web app. 

Tools Used: Adobe XD & Sketch (Lo-Hi Fi's, Illustrator (Icons), Excel (Sprint Plans), Balsamiq (Prototypes) FullStory & Intercom (Monitoring)

WHY do we need another app?

Account HQ believed that Salespeople spend too much time entering information into CRM when they could be out making sales. I designed this section of the new sales canvas website, which goes into more depth of what sets the company apart from a regular CRM. 

This was what the product looked like when I first joined the company. 

If you're thinking the data is looking a little...dense, then you're correct. The main focus of the company was to make increase data density and do away with the minimalist trend that we see so often. This is a common practice when designing a CRM. However, even when following the data density theory, the problem was a lack of focus. The user was paralyzed with the amount of information seen all at once. It did not prioritize the user's needs or workflow. Since I did not have access to communicate to the users due to company regulations, I had to find other ways to research the user to guide my designs. I shared my experience on How I did UX Research with a $0 UX budget and no direct communication to the user here.

HOW can we better usability?

Account HQ is an enterprise UX app. The rules are different for enterprise UX so this project was less about making things pretty and more about creating functional features that sales people would find intuitive. 

There were five main guidelines when creating features for Account HQ which all features had to follow:

1. User showed interest for the feature
2. Feature was glanceable
3. Feature was prioritized on page according to importance
4. Feature placement encouraged "data density" instead and not "minimalism" design
5. Feature followed current style guide & branding (even though this had an older outdated feel, it was important to adhere to what the users were used to in terms of sales enterprise standard visual language. Functional > Pretty)

KEY DELIVERABLES

1. FORECAST

The forecast section helped team members and team managers see if monthly and yearly goals were being reached.  There were 4 essential user needs communicated in this design.

1. User needed a way to visualize their monthly and yearly goals. 
2. User needed to see all options, resulting in toggles and radio buttons (quick views of either options).
3. Users needed certain information prioritized. Since the Pipeline and Forecast were the most accessed features according to FullStory, I placed it first on the page. 
4.  The UI, though not attractive, needed to match the current existing UI so to not confuse the user. 

To input the sales goals, the team manager would input it in the settings page. This simple feature was demanded by the user to be implemented the next week, and was something we would, in the future, implement within the forecast graph itself instead of redirecting users to the settings page. 

2. NEW SALES PIPELINE

B E F O R E 

Initially the sales pipeline was hard to read, and hard to discern the difference between information because of the monotonous colors. 

A F T E R

To combat the monotony and increase contrast, I made the headers more visible, made the chevrons line up with one another, and added colour that signified a user was getting closer to closing a deal by showing the columns getting a darker blue. Overall this increased the user's readability.