A framework for understanding people’s real problems and translating various needs into one meaningful product.
Background
Ongoing Challenges and Re-Evaluation
At Base, one of the responsibilities of All-In-One team is to build those core sales features that could affect buyers’ decision. By doing this well, we are not only gaining more happy customers, but also making our Support and Implementation team’s life easier.
We as a team are constantly challenged and fascinated by the following questions:
How might we dig into people’s feature requests, and really understand their motivations and problems?
How might we take care of various use cases of different types of customers?
How might we boil our insights down into something actionable for the whole team? (Something concise that could facilitate both communication and execution.)
My role
"Playing the Whole Game"
I am the only designer on All-In-One team, which consists of around 25 members. I am actively involved in all parts of project lifecycles, designing and shaping the product with our team across web and mobile (iOS, Android).
I have participated and shipped the following major projects:
Deduplication (web)
Company Hierarchy (web, mobile)
User Management with User Roles (web)
Shipped Projects
Bringing Value to Both Our Customers and Base
1. Deduplication (web)
At the time, Base wasn’t able to provide enough feedback and mechanism to help customers address potential duplicates when they are either manually adding or importing objects (Leads, Contacts, Deals) to the platform. And this was identified as the #1 cause of churn for our CSM-managed customers.
By shipping this project, we not only achieved 90% less duplicates from manual entry & import, but also explored and established a foundation of patterns for our new Import and Settings experience.
The goal of this project was to enable customers effectively sell to companies with multiple subsidiaries. We provided a solution that could help people not only better understand their past sales activities, but also identify potential opportunities across the hierarchy of companies. We also established a framework of thinking & designing FUX (First-time User Experience) for our future releases.
3. User Management with User Roles (web)
It had been a while that our customers couldn’t manage their users and teams easily in Base. And it took lots of efforts for our Implementation and Support team to help customers setup & maintain their accounts.
The challenge was mainly around the way we had built a permission tree at backend, which constrained us from shipping the best experience to customers, especially considering the tight deadline and deals at hand. This was one of the project that illustrated how Product, Design, and Engineering teams challenged each other and eventually shipped a solution that satisfies everyone.
