The Need for A Vision Statement | A First-Hand Experience
Being the only design learner at a company with a fledgeling creative team taught me a few things that I’d like to share. This summer I did an internship at a software company called CometChat which adds voice, video and text chat to sites and mobile applications.
The Company has a team of 70 including sales and marketing and a fledgeling creative team.
Here is the background…
- The initial brief was to do a guerilla style of system analysis which meant I worked in tandem with the development, marketing and client servicing teams.
- Internship period of 1.5 months.
- Engineering led company moving toward being a design-led one.
- User data present in CRM and a few other places. And like many startups, data sanctity and enrichment can be improved.
- Glitch troubleshooting through client grievance reports and user testing.
Key Challenge | Why design?
Several companies often are not exposed to the value proposition presented in the designerly process of problem resolution that is a key problem several designers face as interns or even employees of engineering dominated workplaces. The extended time taken in problem recognition seems like a waste when the agile, scrum, or sprint frameworks create seemingly shippable products. These have proven to be harmful to products while shipping since quickly written code tends to have several bug fixes and the product shipped turns out to be full of glitches and hence definitions and quality standard guidelines are extremely important to put forth before sprints and scrum cycles.
Design proves to be extremely helpful when looking both prospectively and retrospectively since problems are looked at from a consumer point of view instead of “whether the code works or not.”
Internship 101: Don’t refrain from doing things that you aren’t “supposed” to do
“Help us think of a header tag for our site” Yeah, sure!
Think of how you can apply everything you’ve learned while utilizing the tools at hand. The header is supposed to resonate with company philosophy while being the most efficient search word and be crisp at the same time.
It was found through the sales team that most of our customers that are generated from Social media marketing campaigns and SEO & SEM are developers who are paid by someone to add functional capabilities provided by the company to their site.
Even though the task was small, The following persona was made…
- Danny mainly does commission work.
- He is proficient at eliciting information from stack overflow
- familiar with the technical keywords of several development platforms.
- Compares the best payoff products online. (This became a valuable insight for the pricing page)
Final Output: “ Chat SDK and API: Voice, Video & Text Chat on Web and Mobile Apps | CometChat” Which boosted search result traffic by 12–15% daily customers over the time period of a week.
Understanding the product
After a few assignments in marketing like the one above and a few in UI design: I was allowed to run free and express my views. So I set out to understand the entire premise of the company which for me meant creating a customer journey map throughout the onboarding flow which resulted in a 184 slide presentation full of small nuggets of insight using the think-aloud protocol but without vocalisation. Which lead to changes like the following…
Quick Activity: Spot the difference!
24 Seconds.
| Keeping the brand in mind while trying to optimize
The signup from the left screen took 46 seconds to go through whereas the one on the right took 22 seconds on average to sign-up. This 24 second shave proved to be extremely valuable since it increased the amount of signups which means more people reached the plan selection page and signed up for free trials. Additions like Auto-capitalization in the name column, auto-acquiring country codes and breakdown of the journey into steps made the process vividly clear to users and were the changes that facilitated the time saving effect. The page optimization should be aligned with the company’s vision of the experience they want to provide to their user. This is the first touch point for access to their product and should be seamless and quick just like the product experience is promised to be and thus makes for one of the formative thoughts and feelings about the product as a whole.
How was this validated?
A/B testing was used to validate whether the new design was responsible for the changes it was intended for.
App Analysis
This lead to confidence generation in using the design intern (i.e. me) as a resource and the assignment of an in-depth analysis of their mobile apps on both iOS and Android to submit to developers for improvement. The method used to conduct this analysis was to take the user persona of the end consumer of the product and then going through daily use for a period of three days. The analysis proved to be important in maintaining the image of the efficiency of the product and the user persona was helpful in keeping consumer experiences in mind while looking at the value proposition as opposed to the effort put in by the development team.
The importance of a Vision Statement
After constant work on the platform and making slight tweaks to enhance the experience of a consumer, I came to the realization that a macro perspective of the product experience needed to be taken. The Ad-hoc optimization of the could prove to be counterproductive in the long run even though it reaped short term growth spurts. The following were my recommendations for a way forward.
Creation of a Brand Vision:
This is at the top of the hierarchy, the vision of a company is broad in nature and is the work philosophy the company follows regardless of the product output and discontinuity creates confusion in employee roles and trickles down the pyramid. This is the desired end state of a company, all actions taken will directly or indirectly help in achievement of this state.
Example Vision Statement:
WWF (World Wildlife Fund): We seek to save a planet, a world of life. Reconciling the needs of human beings and the needs of others that share the Earth…
Missions, goals, objectives are shorter term than a vision. Definition of the product road-map comes from a vision statement, changes in technology need not change a vision.
Product Identity | Who are we?
The product identity is a derivative of the vision,it is a visual and literary manifestation of the vision. Following are the recommendations I left for elements and considerations for the product’s identity…
- Visual Design
- Illustrations
- Typography
- Copy (Any write up in all places of product visibility)
- Website design
- Information Architecture
- Keywords | Action Words | Power words
- Internal communication formats
- Consideration of present and future consumers of the product.
- Product road-maps.
Accommodation of Data-Driven Design
It is essential to take analytics based design decisions. In the current phase of development the company even though provides software solutions, does not support infrastructure to extract insights from data like cursor heat-maps or page stay time. Gradual integration of data based insights will only prove to be valuable for companies. These were my recommendation on data collection points from the time I spent with them…
- Setup Metrics collection infrastructure
- Create Client Life Cycles
- Page hierarchy / categorization
- Collect data on
- Average page stay times
- Daily active users
- Average session times
- Sales on-boarding ( the number of people subscribed to the product at the daily/ monthly / annual basis)
- Free trial to paid client conversion at a daily/weekly/quarterly/yearly level
- Bounce rates (alternation between different pages or in and out of the website)
Plan for redundancy
A challenge in bootstrapped startups is resources and time are of very high value and that leads to high concentration of responsibilities. The recommendation rooted out of sheer concern for some at the top since they were involved in all tasks from the base level to the top of the pyramid. Planning for a time where they wouldn’t be efficient enough or willing to do the same amount of work daily through gradual delegation of responsibility is a necessity.
As long as the company is walking on the lines of the vision, it is irrelevant who facilitates that, designing oneself out of a self sustaining system is necessary for anyone to move on to something new.
Thus there was plenty to learn and to contribute, I’d like to thank Taru Agarwal, The Main men Anuj and Anant Garg and my mentor for the internship Amit Thaker for is valuable insight and his wonderful team at CometChat.
