Executive Leads
Date
Tools
Responsibilities
Project Brief
Executive Leads sells franchise leads with the goal of helping corporate professionals achieve their dreams of business ownership. They use innovative and proprietary lead generation systems to provide the highest quality franchise lead on the market.
My role was the Product Designer. I collaborated with the co-founder, project manager, and a team of software engineers.
Executive Leads used a Google Sheets spreadsheet to manage the delivery of their marketing leads to customers. In this spreadsheet, users manually tracked lead delivery and customer preferences. The complex sheet required excessive administrative time and training to understand. It became a pain point for stakeholders due to time management concerns and an overwhelming information overload.
We moved forward with a custom dashboard solution that automates lead delivery based on customer preferences and displays helpful metrics to help users track sales progress. Additionally, the application empowers customers with their own portal to view their leads and update delivery preferences.
Project Overview
Below is an overview of the design phases of this project.
Challenges
Users of the manual spreadsheet were unable to access some of the most valuable data due to an overwhelming information overload. The amount of information led to a long horizontal scroll which required the user to spend a lot of time hunting down the type of data they needed.
Undefined color coding throughout caused confusion and meant longer onboarding and training required for new users.
State exclusions and other restrictions had to be tracked manually for each customer, and the lack of internal controls left room for errors in lead delivery.
Goals
In order for this project to be a success, we had to:
Make the application intuitive and display the relevant data without overwhelming users.
Empower users to manipulate the data with robust sorting and filtering capabilities.
Implement customer preferences into the lead delivery system and allow customers to update preferences in their portal.
Create a ticketing system to manage customer issues and requests in a timely manner.
Design Process
Below is an overview of my process. As this was a long-term contract (> 6 months) this process was completed for multiple user flows within the desktop application. We tackled the admin portal first, as this was a more robust application. We then iterated on this to create an intuitive customer portal.
A lot of my time was spent understanding the data tracked in the current lead-delivery spreadsheet. During this research and exploration stage, I asked the stakeholders high-level questions, that would lead to more feature-specific questions, which helped bridge the gap in my understanding of the new platform and their users' journeys.
In order for me to speed up my understanding and explore possible solutions, I created wireframes and prototyped them in Figma. My goal during this stage is to hone in on user flows.
Once the wireframes were completed, I scheduled a meeting (or recorded a video demo) to present my work to stakeholders. During this stage, I was able to ask for more clarification and locate the missing puzzle pieces in my understanding. Typically, I met with stakeholders at least once a week during a standup meeting.
Using the feedback I receive from the previous stage, I use this time to update the wireframes with the additional information and present the new versions to stakeholders again. I repeat this process until my wireframes are approved.
The Solution
We moved forward with a desktop application with features built for both the admin and customer portals. I implemented the Material Design System for this project to ensure design consistency throughout and long-term scalability for the application.
To give users a high-level snapshot upon first login, we created admin and customer dashboards. The admin dashboard displays the sales team's progress with lead sales goals and gives an overview of active support tickets. The customer dashboard displays the number of lead credits they have remaining and an overview of their support tickets.
To increase the visibility of the sales process on the admin side, we created tables for Leads, Customers, and Orders. This gave the admin multiple starting points to manipulate the data in the best way to achieve their current goals.
We automated the customer lead purchase process so that customers could automatically purchase more lead credits when their balance falls below a certain number. The customer would need to opt-in to this feature and specify the number of leads to purchase in each recurrence.
Key Takeaways
During the project, my primary emphasis was on asking relevant questions to gain a deep understanding of the challenges they were encountering.
By taking this approach, I aimed to foster a collaborative environment where the focus was on the problem at hand.
As the Product Designer, I focused on being an advocate for the user. When given certain design tickets, that meant meeting with the stakeholders to address concerns about the user journey and presenting alternative solutions that would adhere to UX best practices.
While the initial scope of this project did not include prototyping, I recognized the value this would add to my discussions with stakeholders and engineers throughout.
I chose to create a high-fidelity interactive prototype deliverable with each milestone to show the desired animations and interactions. This greatly improved the cross-functional collaboration on this project between stakeholders, myself, and the development team.