Context
The goal was to allow customers to represent and automate their sales process entirely within the product. The product contained some email features but lacked the ability to send multiple emails, SMS, or make calls in a cadence to truly represent a customers sales process.
My Role:
- Metabolise research into actionable design outcomes
- Partner with PM to define scope levels
- Prototype interactions and flows
- Full design of all screens and states
- Describe all states in a spec for engineering
Business Need
Competitors had launched sequencing tools for emails and customers were moving to these other platforms. To create a competitive advantage, Close needed its own sequencing tool that was extensive for different mediums as the feature scaled.
Customer Need
Customers were forced to create workarounds using smart lists and link them from external products to manually manage the cadence of their sales process outside of Close. This caused inefficiency, frustration, and additional cost for separate products.
Given that calls are a manual process, how can they be included in a timed sequence?
Constraints
There was no current technical system to track changes to any lead that was in a sequence. Emails should come first because there is an existing system in place and they can be sent without human interaction. SMS likely to follow soon after. Given the shape-up methodology, the initial feature needs to be completed within 6 weeks.
Exploration
Lo-fi sketching and flows are a key part of any project to quickly explore multiple ideas and see which resonate with users, stakeholders, and can be accomplished within the given scope and constraints.
Concepts
Higher fidelity earlier can sometimes be necessary when trying to explore interaction concepts as opposed to hierarchy and flows; though they are often completed in parallel with broader low-fi efforts.
What customer's said
“I'm super excited to start testing on a bigger scale, this could totally change all the janky automation I've set up over the last year!”
“Keeps the team more organized—using Close more.”
To be continued...
While email and SMS were launched first, calls and tasks require a few other features to be built first in order to be useful.
Here are some concepts for what that future might look like.
