Design Considerations for a SaaS Acquisition
What if you were informed that the company you work for was acquiring a company, and you were offered the opportunity to work on the team? That is exactly what happened at SalesLoft last spring when we acquired Noteninja. When asked to work on the project as the product designer, I did not hesitate to take it on. I had never assisted in acquiring a company and did not know the challenges that were ahead from a design standpoint. I had multiple questions running through my head. How would we take their UI (user interface) and integrate it into the design system within SalesLoft? Would we have the opportunity to improve usability while completing the integration? What kind of timeline would I have to complete the design work? I found the answers to all of these questions during the integration and learned some great lessons as well.
Once we began to dig into our goals and timelines, we came to the conclusion that we had two weeks to complete our portion of the integration. Two weeks to complete research, build a fully functioning design prototype, complete all usability testing, and iterate on the designs based on research findings. The majority of my first few days on the acquisition team was spent digging into Noteninja. I was searching for UI elements they currently utilized in their application that we could reuse and what major components we would have to design from scratch. Prior to being brought onto the acquisition team, Lauren Langley, SalesLoft’s Director of Product Design, had already begun working through designs for the card element of the UI as well as ideas for how we could work through the rest of the UI. We tried to rely heavily on UI components that we currently had in SalesLoft such as panels, buttons, and iconography. Once the main design architecture was identified, we started working through building the components that we did not currently have in our application.
Noteninja was a software platform for recording and analyzing meetings. The recording portion of the software was mostly done in the backend with very little UI. The majority of the UI lived within the analysis portion; this is where the components lived that we did not currently utilize in the SalesLoft platform. Modernizing a video player to feel useful to the user, as well as familiar, was one of the more complicated tasks. Speaking to the users that were currently utilizing Noteninja, we realized they wanted the player to have a similar feel to popular video players such as YouTube or Netflix. At the end of the integration, I firmly believed that we ended up with a video player that is both familiar and usable. Beyond the video player, we were tasked with taking on designing the ability to share recordings and clips to prospects in a seamless, intuitive way. The original design for sharing in Noteninja was complicated and heavy; there was no clear path forward while taking on these tasks. Not only were we able to simplify the task, we were able to accomplish this by rearchitecting the structure without changing the functionality. This allowed the code beyond HTML and CSS to be untouched by engineers, but still improve the usability for the user.
We made our way through identifying and designing all of the base UI components that we needed to build a fully functioning prototype. Building the prototype posed problems of its own. We needed to decide what path we wanted the user to travel through while also having alternative paths in the case that a user proceeded in a way that was different from what was expected. One week and many late nights later, the prototype, which ended up being a 105-screen prototype, was ready to be tested for usability. With help from Tim Yoo, UX Researcher at SalesLoft, we dove into what ended up being nine hour-long usability tests. Participants were drawn from current SalesLoft customers that had experience using Gong or Noteninja. We measured participants on time to complete tasks and the success rate of each task to formulate a usability score for each participant. I am an advocate of designers participating in usability testing for features and prototypes that they have designed. It allows the designer to see how their customers expect a feature to function rather than relying on interpreting findings later down the road. In cases where participants were struggling with a certain component, I quickly iterated on the design to provide our users with a better experience. This short feedback loop and iterative process were crucial to meeting our 2-week timeline and having the designs ready for our engineers to begin coding.
Pretty straightforward, right? There were many lessons learned throughout the entire process, from how to integrate an existing UI into our software to setting goals and justifying a timeline to stakeholders. While the timeline was tight and the workload was heavy, designing the integration of Noteninja into SalesLoft was a very rewarding experience for me. Integrating another application’s UI from a design standpoint will never be easy, nor is there a silver bullet that will explain step-by-step how to be successful in doing so. Being driven, setting goals, and surrounding yourself with a team that is biased towards action and trusts each other will help ensure that you will achieve success. I am looking forward to SalesLoft’s next acquisition and being able to apply what I have learned.
Dylan is a Product Design Manager at SalesLoft on the Product Design team. He is a father of 2 and enjoys writing and recording music in his spare time.
