The story of Reveal Now
This article is the first of many from our Verizon Connect Design team where we share our process and thoughts on design. What better way to kick off than with the recently released ‘Reveal Now’.
Reveal Now is a light version of our Reveal fleet tracking software launched recently. In order to communicate this product online, we created an interactive demo of Reveal Now for our potential customers to explore. We wanted to show prospective customers how our product looks, feels and ultimately the value it can bring to their business before they buy it.
Finding the story
Our first thought was to build an interactive demo that allowed the customer to interact with Reveal Now using dummy data that would be similar to a business such as their own. However, prototyping this interactive demo showed us that we weren’t communicating the value our product can bring to a business. We knew we needed to add this layer of value on top of this interactive experience, and we knew that in order to communicate this value we would need to tell a story. This realisation of value, delivered in the form of a story, would become the backbone of the project.
As the interactive demo is a sales tool, we decided to speak with our customer facing teams. So we set up rounds of interviews with our sales team. We asked the sales team:
- What were the features that our customers were most interested in?
- How did the sales team match these features to customer problems?
- What was their tone-of-voice?
A non-linear story
The first draft of our story ran from beginning to end, and brought the customer through the entire story of Reveal. However, after some initial user testing it became apparent that wasn’t how users wanted to use the demo. They wanted to jump into the sections that related to them the most, and then explore outwards. So we revised the narrative and the architecture of the experience to support this behaviour with succinct chapters that would prompt the discovery of other chapters after viewing.
This realisation of interlinked chapters drastically changed the direction of the experience, and would give us a framework for creating the experience. This framework would produce chapters that were short, exciting and deliver something engaging.
Within each chapter, we wanted to find the best way to communicate each piece of customer value. Is it a video of a Reveal customer giving a testimonial? Is it an animated gif of the interface moving through transitional states? Or is it letting the customer interact with Reveal so they could see it for themselves? We would work closely with our engineers to understand what was possible. This collaborative, objective approach to design and development is something that we have found to result in an innovative and quality product, both on this project and many others.
We spend most of our time as a design team working on delivering features which mostly live inside of our products, so this was a welcome departure for us to collaborate with the marketing and sales teams. After launching the demo, we showcased it in a new purchasing flow, to create a frictionless purchasing experience for our customers.
Explore Reveal Now https://demo.us.verizonconnect.com/en-US/map-beta/
The Reveal Now Demo was designed by Zoë Stringer, Billy Fitzgerald and Neil Donovan. It won the Most Innovative Use of Pendo at this year’s Pendomonium awards
