TL;DR
In this B2B project on web, iOS and Android platforms, I worked as a Lead Product Designer in a Product Development team comprised of; a team lead, product manager, web & Android developer, two iOS developers and two backend developers. I led discovery through conducting customer interviews and usability testing sessions. To structure, make sense of and share the findings, I used Miro. Using Figma, I created prototypes for these sessions, final designs to hand over to developers and expanded Speakaps’ design system with missing components. With this initiative, I have succesfully contributed to an increase of +166,566% in usage of Speakaps’ Task Management solution in terms of task completion, as well as indirectly contributing to the increase in upsell of this feature.
The Project
Organisation Setup
To understand some of the complexities, it is important to know how Speakap allows customers to tailor the organisational setup to their needs.
Let’s take a fictive international retail company. This company has a large presence in Europe. At the same time, they have departments such as; sales, stores, cashiers, and cleaning crew.
Part of Speakap’s secret sauce is the ability to sync with a customer’s HR system, meaning anytime someone joins or leaves a company, they will be plotted in the right place within the organisational chart.
Taking the above example, we can see that all these departments are present in every country. To distinguish between them, Speakap allows customers to create a Global Department which houses all the Local Departments.
In this example, you could have a Sales Local Department in The Netherlands, Hungary and Sweden. Countries are used as Business Units and so the Local Departments don’t only belong to the vertical Countries but also to the Global Department.
Customers are free to tailor this setup to their organisations and Speakap also offers other common terminology used across industries in place of Departments and Business Units.
Thinking of our ideal customer profile, we knew that Speakap’s Task Management solution is tailored towards large organizations, with people sitting in the headquarters assigning tasks across the organization as well as regional managers or store managers assigning tasks top-down. In Takko’s case tasks are even assigned across countries and in other cases even across continents.
Task Complexities
I started with identifying all the complexities of the tool that would needed to be taken into consideration for this feature.
One of the first complexities I identified at the start of the project, related to the different task types that an author can assign. A simple individual task to a person, a task assigned to a group that needs to be completed by all its members or a task assigned to a group that only needs to be completed once by any member of the respective group. These seemed confusing to authors, as they kept confusing the different task types.
Another challenge I identified was, when Tasks was built before I joined Speakap, someone decided to exclude the author of a task from a group task that needed to be completed by all members. Of course, a user can be part of multiple Business Units or Departments at a time, which raises a whole set of other challenges.
Next, we have the task view with two tabs; My Tasks and Assigned Tasks. An author could also be an assignee of the same task, giving users two unique views of the same task in the respective tabs.
Lastly, having a lot of permissions throughout Speakap, it could also be that you see tasks in the Assigned Tasks tab that weren’t even created by you.
These are just some of the complexities I had to uncover and consider while working on this project.
Recipient Selector Component
One of my focuses was on redesigning the recipient selector component, to align with the platform’s visual language and address usability issues identified in previous testing and customer feedback. Below, you can see what the component looked like at the start of this project.
This component is a consistent touchpoint across all features of Speakap; News, Events, Journeys, Polls and across many settings pages. We call each of these a “message”, to keep things simple. Each message also has additional logic to manipulate the contents in the component.
Some can upload recipients using CSV, an important functionality for our larger customers with 10K+ employees in thousands of groups.
Others have a feature called Labels enabled, which essentially groups a predetermined set of Business Units, Departments and groups under one umbrella.
Some messages also allow selecting only groups or individuals to send a message to. Tasks have their own set of requirements and complexities as well of course.
All of this had to be considered when I redesigned the component. I managed to convince stakeholders of the importance of this step, by arguing that the improvements would be exponential, since the component is used across the platform for all message types.
Process
Given the request from a high-profile customer, Takko Fashion, I led the initiative to create a universally applicable solution. At the same time, the roles of PO’s changed to PM’s. Our PM wasn’t experienced in discovery, so I guided the PM through the discovery process, starting with listing assumptions and validating them through customer interviews.
I started by listing out our assumptions and thinking about how we can best validate them. We then proceeded to set up customer interviews with 5 of our customers. Based on all of our assumptions, I created several prototypes to test our assumptions in these sessions.
Based on our findings, we validated some high-level needs of our customers which informed the scope of the project. We also found some additional challenges to this project and some questions that arose from collaborating with developers in parallel.
For example, the way we presented the different task types was confusing. We knew that this would need to be resolved so that when users assign a task to thousands of groups at a time they could be confident in knowing that they created exactly the type of task they set out to create.
Using the insights gained, I iterated on the prototypes and conducted follow-up sessions with the same customers. This iterative process allowed me to finalize the high-level design for the start of development.
At this stage it felt like the best moment, so I also created and documented the recipient selector component in our design library, ensuring consistency across the platform.
As you can see below, I also took the time to put together all the findings and actions, to share with stakeholders and the rest of the company on Speakap’s platform. This also served as a push to get more buy-in and transparency into the discovery work we were doing at the time.
Impact
Takko Fashion began testing our Task Management solution in May 2023. My focus was on ensuring the feature met their needs and provided significant value. As you can see from the numbers, we have been struggling to keep the existing user base due to basic functionality missing (such as multiple assignees for tasks).
This is why converting this customer was seen as such a big opportunity. A +20K organisation looking to invest their resources to introduce our solution, we would learn a lot from their productivity needs which would help us bring the product to be well positioned within the market to grow our user base.
The gradual rollout for this customer started in May with 2000 employees. Since the customer needed this feature to begin using, we didn’t see much usage during the initial rollout.
The first release we had for this feature was on the 28th of June. You can see a spike in task creation, which is Takko testing and finally working to set up Tasks for their organisation with their initial rollout group. You see an upward trend starting at the end of July for completed tasks, which is when they rolled out to the rest of the organisation. There are of course dips, which are normal in the retail industry on the weekends - as those are their busiest days in which employees won’t be doing much operational work other than restocking and tending to customers.
The second release was on the 10th of January, as the team worked on other initiatives in between.
First, we saw a +383.3% increase in task completion between the rollout phase and the first release of the feature.
Following this, we saw a +51.4% increase with the second release, where only one person needed to complete a task from a group.
With the small caveat of releasing additional improvements in between releases of this initiative, such as displaying images in-line of task descriptions and translating tasks, the usage increase we saw was massive. From an average of 15 tasks being completed per month
to 21,5K tasks being completed. This is a staggering 166K% increase.
Saying that the impact of this initiative has undeniably paid off for Speakap would be an understatement.
Retrospective
This initiative had its highs and lows and there were plenty of learnings that I identified.
Firstly, we should have devoted more efforts to keep it more agile by splitting releases into smaller chunks. From start to finish, including letting the team have a breather and work on other things between releases, the entire initiative took almost a full year to release.
Secondly, I recognized that pushing for an earlier implementation of task type selection improvements could have significantly enhanced user understanding and productivity. While we had attempted to make the selection clearer in the past, it became evident during the discovery of this initiative that it was still confusing. However, this is the backbone of the entire functionality and a crucial part of the admin and frontline experiences. It has always confused our end-users and held back their organisations’ productivity; an essential piece of the puzzle, which should have been addressed much earlier.
Lastly, while we were super proud of the success of the feature, as a team we underestimated the scalability needs that came from Takko’s usage, which led to backend performance issues that we resolved subsequently.
This is something that we should have thought of from the start of the project to ensure a smooth experience for our customers.
While the team and I learned a lot from this initiative, we undoubtedly delivered a high-value and impact improvement for our customers and Speakap. This is clear from; the unprecedented increase in usage of Speakap’s task management solution, the overwhelmingly positive feedback we received from customers using the feature and sales/CSM being able to secure more customer upsells for this functionality.