2017 — A Year in Design
The Percolate design team and I started 2017 with a goal to learn more about designing the end-to-end customer experience.
During the year we used customer frameworks to explore ways to discover and prioritize opportunities. This resulted in new collaborations with teams across the company; experiences that allowed design to have a greater impact on our business.
I’ve been reflecting on our progress and three takeaways have surfaced:
- Customer journey stages shaped our brand narrative
- Product gaps enabled design to integrate deeper
- Service design thinking helped us unlock revenue
Lesson Learned — Customer Journey Stages Shaped our Brand Narrative
The customer journey framework we adopted at Percolate has five stages which shows how a prospective customer moves from awareness through to becoming an advocate of our product and company.
The framework coordinates the efforts of teams across our business. In 2017 it prompted the design team to think about how to create experiences that inspired customers to advance in their journey.
The theme for our Transition event last year was ‘The Path to Digital Change’. A day of presentations and conversations about how the world’s most progressive brands are responding to the challenges of technological change. As you may guess, the event programing showcased how our product vision is helping brands navigate this transition.
Knowing that the event’s business goals was to advance opportunities with current customers and late stage prospects, our brand design team advised on how to create an environment that was captivating for attendees, and enabled our sales team to do their best work. From crafting the voice of signage and interior installations, to creating a demo space that invites attendees to learn about our product.
The customer journey framework also helped shape the films we produced in 2017. Films are important assets for our business team to share with prospects and customers to learn more about Percolate. From introducing new products, to how-to tutorials, and customer testimonials.
Knowing the journey stages in which the films are to be viewed helped shape the narrative we created. On one hand, our product how-to tutorial films are viewed by customers who are in the adoption stage. This led us to incorporate the personality and helpful tone of our support team to deliver matter of fact instructions. On the other hand, a customer testimonial film with Tamara Bohlig of Assetmark, introduced a marketing executive that is driving change in her organization through her vision for marketing, and the process and tools she has implemented. By contrast this film is aimed at the consideration stage, and therefore an aspirational tone was created to appeal to the needs of our prospects.
Lesson Learned — Product Gaps Enabled Design to Integrate Deeper
One of the most valuable tools we’ve used to identify product gaps is the Steel Thread. As the name suggests, a Steel Thread is a critical path your users take through your product.
Steel Threads help teams map out and evaluate each step of a user’s journey. The evaluation determines whether a step is good, satisfactory, or poor, in helping a user complete the job they set out to do. We found poor (and absent) steps resulted in our users having bad experiences; some users resorted to complex work rounds, and others left Percolate to do this work using alternative products. These gaps have been a point of consideration when planning product roadmaps. Supporting data points such as related loss reports from sales have helped us prioritize investigation into these problems.
In 2017, the Steel Thread approach helped us identify a product gap our users were facing when going from planning campaigns to executing campaign content on Percolate. Through establishing an enterprise design partnership our product team spent time with customers to examine these problems and explore how we might solve for them. Our solution was introduced at our Transition event and is currently being rolled out in Beta programs before being released in first half of this year.
Beyond being part of the product team that drove this initiative forward, the product designers were members of an internal ‘Going Deep Program’. This program called on the designer’s to meet with members of product management, services, education, marketing, and support on a bi-weekly basis. Through a series of activities the group developed the product positioning, messaging and training materials to enable the Percolate sales and services teams to onboard existing customers, and take the new product to market.
These streams of work also helped us get a couple of supporting projects up and running that started conversations with teams across the company.
The first being the overhaul of the Percolate design system our teams use when building our product. To help kickoff this effort, we invited Josh Clark to join us. During a workshop Josh shared his experience of building enterprise design systems with members of our design, engineering, product management and support team. The session reviewed the progress we had made, and prompted discussions on how we might take the system from a Sketch file to code.
Secondly, in partnership with the services team we formalized how we coordinated design partnerships to collaborate with customers on product development. By elevating this practice internally we began spending more time with customers investigating product opportunities, testing solutions and beta products. There was one problem though, we were still missing a vital input to our product feedback loop; usability testing of our live product. I’m pleased to say we got there towards the end of the year and initial sessions were set-up to help our product team see how our customers were living in our product.
Lesson Learned — Service Design Thinking Helped us Unlock Revenue
Over the last year I’ve been introduced to service design. Whilst I’m still learning about the approach, I wanted to highlight how the service blueprint enabled us to improve the services we’ve delivered to customers.
At its most basic, creating a blueprint helps teams map out ‘frontstage’ interactions that customers experience, and the corresponding ‘backstage’ interactions and ‘supporting processes’ that enable these experiences. To help illustrate the approach I’ve included a simplified blueprint below to show how attendees learn, attend and participate at an event. The blueprint successfully visualizes the critical pieces that need to happen in order to deliver the event experience. This view enables teams to analyze what’s working, and what can be improved.
We kicked off 2017 by introducing the service design blueprint as part of the Design Week schedule in March. A simple workshop walked everyone through the approach and challenged teams to build a blueprint for the service Percolate provides customers.
We discovered that an area of our service that was fertile for improvement was our education services. These services consist of an online knowledge base and a training curriculum to onboard and train customers. Through a series of design sprints we worked together with our education team to identify that we needed to improve how customers resolved basic product issues they encountered, and introduce a way for them purchase a place on training courses. The resulting enhancements reduced the workload of our support team, and enabled the company to sell more training courses.
Another area where we investigated backstage interactions and supporting processes was how we captured and take action on product usability feedback. This past year we’ve looked to aggregate disparate feedback channels and route it to a dashboard on Jira. This first step centralized the information and provided product team members a view onto how the feedback broke down across the product.
The second step was to set-up a weekly review session where product designers and engineers could review the feedback and affinity map it to see where the common issues lay. This was helpful to spark conversations around low-effort projects that could have a high-impact on the customer experience.
Looking to 2018
This past year has shown me that design teams can and must go beyond the roadmaps we create to build our products and brands. By working with our education, services, and support teams our understanding of what it means to design for the enterprise has evolved to learn about new touchpoints. And through focussing on the customer journey we became a more valuable partner to our marketing and sales teams.
Key to these learnings has been the power of visualization. Frameworks like the Customer Journey, Steel Thread, and the Service Blueprint have helped teams identify where fertile ground for collaboration lies.
As a result of these experiences I have become even more curious about how teams can be organized to design holistically. Org Design for Design Orgs advocates for design teams that combine the skillsets found in product and brand design teams in order to continuously evaluate, optimize and design the end-to-end customer experience. This strikes me as one way the design can continue to evolve and increase the impact it has.
In 2018, I’m looking forward to continue learning about how design can help shape incredible customer experiences. Happy New Year everyone.
2017 was also a big year for me personally. My wife and I decided to go on our next adventure. We’ll be moving to London in the spring after exploring Asia. We’re excited about what is to come, but this move is also bittersweet as I have left my role at Percolate. It has been amazing to work alongside such talented teams during my time at the company. I look forward to following their continued success.
