OVERVIEW
Kyocera AI Sales Assistant
In Spring 2020, the design and product team was asked to research and design a concept for a sales enablement tool to help internal marketing and sales teams assess the quality and viability of potential leads.
MY ROLE
UX Designer
TEAM
Stella Salazar, Product Manager
Victoria Kam, Program Manager
Daniela Jones, UX Researcher
Michaela Guerrera, UX Designer
TIMELINE
April 2020 - October 2020
TOOLS
AdobeXD, Miro
PROBLEM
Our product team received feedback that internal marketing teams and sales teams were not aligned on the quality of leads. Marketing would send leads to the sales team, and the sales team would struggle to engage the leads.
To solve this problem, we needed to learn more. So we started with user interviews to gather insights.
DISCOVERY
User Research
For this project, I worked closely with our UX Researcher Daniela to interview different folks from the sales teams and the marketing teams. Daniela and I collaborated on interview questions, and we conducted the interviews together, along with a second UX Designer Michaela. I would take notes and jump in with any questions.
We conducted several user interviews that included sessions with the head of sales, head of marketing, sales manager, and business development representative.
We uncovered 3 key insights:
- The marketing team was coming up with what they believed to be great leads for the sales team
- The sales team would follow up on the leads but the leads were not as qualified as marketing claimed
- Sales reps did not always know the number or type of product offerings they could offer a lead because their organization resold so many different softwares
OPPORTUNITY
Learning that sales reps did not know the types of product offerings they could offer a lead gave us an opportunity to not only help sales teams assess the quality of leads but also create a solution to help train sellers on product offerings.
DISCOVERY
Personas
Through our interview process, we identified two core personas for our tool to help us empathize and understand our seller's problem space.
SALES ENABLEMENT MANAGER
Focused on overseeing the big picture on training the team, increasing ROI, and growing the knowledge base
SALES MANAGER
Focused on increasing sales and pursuing quality leads.
DESIGN
Ideation
Using Miro, I gathered examples of different applications and UI designs that could help make our sales tool feel useful and engaging without relying on forms.
WIREFRAMING
When creating these wires, I imagined a seller filling out a survey about leads and immediately thought of how many find forms tedious and annoying. I wanted to design a conversational and visual survey.
I wanted to focus less on input forms and more on gathering information through clickable buttons.
CHALLENGES
I struggled with how to communicate the potential success rate of a lead. Does one pursue a lead that’s 60% successful and 40% unsuccessful? I wanted to get more answers through testing and using insights to inform my next iterations.
I saw an opportunity to show which software or professional services in our product catalog might be most useful based on the survey answers.
PROCESS
High fidelity
After creating my wires, I collaborated with my PM Stella on the requirements for the lead qualification survey. Then I began to create high fidelity wireframes.
NEW BRANDING GUIDELINES
Translating Kyocera's new brand guidelines from print to the web was a fun highlight of this project.
EXPERIMENTING WITH PRODUCT ILLUSTRATION
To make the product feel more engaging, I experimented with using license-free illustrations from UnDraw and filling them with the new color palette.
PROCESS
Prototyping & Testing
To make the survey feel less tedious and more fun, I experimented with writing in a tone that was conversational and colloquial. I also wanted to write in a more casual tone over a technical tone because I theorized that it might help people fill out the survey more quickly. I did three iterations of the survey prototype.
After conducting usability tests with 3 participants, we learned the following about how to improve the survey experience:
- Add options for unknowns in the survey
- Add options for sub-industries
- Add options for adding a pain point that might not be defined
REVISING THE RESULTS PAGE
The results page underwent several revisions after testing. We learned that our participants expressed doubt in an AI prediction about the potential success or failure of a lead.
We learned it would be more impactful to suggest best-fit products and professional services to help train and empower sales teams.
The progression of each revision is below. In the final version, we added a checklist of the next steps that sales could follow up on.
RETROSPECTIVE
Learnings
It was a great experience collaborating with our UX Researcher Daniela and assisting her with notetaking in interviews.
This project helped me gain skills in how to use insights from bi-weekly agile demos and usability testing to iterate on my previous designs.
If I could go back in time, I would have advocated for more time to research and build out the lead tracking and management experience, and how it would differ for each of our personas - especially Sales Development Representatives.