How our redesign helped us grow 10x in a year — a UX case study
Introduction
We, at Map My Customers, have been creating an all-in-one suite for managing outside sales. It has a ton of amazing capabilities on the web that changes the way sales people work and helps increase their productivity by over 40%, allowing them to hit their sales quota without fail every time. However, over the past few months, we’ve outgrown the model of simply appending new features to our existing product. We’ve also made each of these new features a little difficult to adopt by designing each of them slightly differently.
The redesign of Map My Customers is about creating a design system for our web and mobile experiences, which should both re-organize and present all of our features (old and new) in a more accessible and findable way.
Problems with the old design
Unwieldy Navigation
Despite having an amazing set of features and tools, they’ve become obscured by our growing list of features. Since there is such a thin connection between some of them, our customers are not aware of the tools that are actually within their reach. Customers may have a real need for accessing check-ins, reminders, territories etc but because they don’t see it or because it is positioned as a peripheral feature, they won’t ever actually try it. Even adding a new account, contact or deal is a difficult thing to do with the current navigation setup.
Tangled features for Accounts, Contacts and Leads
Map My Customers helps you manage your accounts, contacts and potential customers differently. When these spaces merged together, not only was the information hierarchy compromised, so was the find-ability of the data. It became difficult for users to view different kinds of data all in a single map interface. This was also a problem for team accounts where you could have a huge number of activities and all of them would show up under “Mapping” with merged views.
Complex Filters
Filtering is one of the most important features when it comes to handling or visualizing a huge number of customers at the same time. But this option being hidden under “Tools”, made it difficult to find. Even after the user drilled down, the interface was not friendly enough to show the frequently used filters, or even the “groups” filter in an intuitive way. This became a big problem when users had multiple filters to apply, resulting in a number of extra clicks and a serious waste of time.
Haphazard view of activities and reports
The Dashboard had tabs for activity, charts and reports — thereby making charts and reports/activity mutually exclusive from one another and difficult to visualize. Reminders and check-ins which are also a part of the activity occupying a separate space on the right, making the information display all over the place. The first thing most sales people want to review when they log in is their performance over a certain period of time and not just pins scattered on a map that have no calls to action attached to them. This dashboard came way down in the navigation and also failed to provide any sort of scannable data for the reps.
Difficult to find new potential customers
Map My Customers allows users to find potential customers around them. This is one of the most useful features when it comes to sales people reaching out for new opportunities. But this option was hidden under the “Add New Contact” option which many users would never even find out.
Boring Log In and Sign Up forms
The process of signing up or logging in was boring and did not motivate the user enough to go ahead, resulting in higher bounce rates on our platform compared to another platform where Sign Up is more seamless.
And many more..
With the existing UX, many features such as like importing/integrating data, performing a global search, visualizing customers etc became very limited.
This is when we thought of redesigning the product. Coupled with a whole new range of features, we aimed at solving the existing UX issues, and making information a lot more findable.
Solutions in redesign
After evaluating the products in our space, we decided to come up with the next version of our product. This version would sport a much better user experience and come packed with a bunch of new features that our users will surely appreciate.
Better categorization of data
We improved the navigation of the application by getting rid of the section “Mapping” altogether. Now, the top-level objects in our information hierarchy would be “Accounts”, “Contacts” and “Deals.”, 3 different views containing their own own sub- categories. This reduces the confusion that results from having all the three merged into “Mapping”.
User Dashboard
We now have our Dashboard as the homepage, so users can have an overview of what is happening when they log in to the platform instead of processing an overwhelming amount of data on the map view.
The mid section of the dashboard shows an overview of:
- How many active accounts the user currently has
- All of the user’s reminders so he or she can start his or her tasks faster, charts for different categories that show how user is performing, loss reasons, reviews etc
- Charts to show his or her performance and analytics defining the reasons for deal loss, reviews etc. Extensive filter options help users filter their charts in which ever way they want.
- Activity like recent check-ins, user tracks, routes etc.
The left section gives options for team management and the right one shows a dynamic list of activities that are happening.
Separate views for visualizing in map and scanning in list
We decided to have separate tabs for the map view and list view for each of the Accounts, Contacts and Deals pages. This was so that the user can switch between visualizing pins on map and collecting information about his or her customers from the list view.
Advanced Filters
We put a filter button on the top right of the screen present for every view. This helps the user access the filter section and apply custom filters. Groups has “equals any of” and “equals all of” in a simple dropdown which makes “AND/OR” boolean-logic much simpler to understand for the common user. The radius filter is also a slider giving further flexibility for radius selection.
Easier way to find leads
We introduced the Lead Gen button to sit in the subnav for all accounts and contacts map pages. Clicking on the button would show nearby leads to the user. We also introduced lead gen options during routing so users can visit leads while on their way to other customers. We allow users to search for categories of leads and also save searches.
Better Sign Up and Log In forms
The forms for Sign Up and Log In became much more aesthetically pleasing, and we also took the chance to tutor our users about the different components in the platform, along with displaying social proof and testimonials at every step of the Sign Up and Log In process to keep users motivated.
Other functionalities
We added a universal search button in the navbar to enable global search. The platform also enables users to sync multiple tables with CRMs in one go along with a cool set of new features we came up with.
New features
Email Automation
We introduced several new features for Email Automation through which users can organize email campaigns, save templates and view their campaign performance. They can also sync their email accounts with our platform to avoid confusion.
Mileage Tracking
We added the feature of mileage tracking under “Routing”, where users can monitor how many miles they traveled, how much time was spent driving, customer meet-ups etc.
These features coupled with some more like cadence management, opportunity visualization and others made our product much stronger than what we had just one year back.
Here’s what they look like:
Our users were overwhelmed with our overhaul, and with the set of features and experience we provided them. We grew our customer base by nearly 10x. We did guerilla testing of the product with many of our customers to iterate on them further. However, with this solved set of issues came new experiences which we are thriving to make better everyday and will reflect in our upcoming releases.
P.S. We also revamped our iOS and Android apps. We’re coming up with insights of this design process very soon!
