Product Designer lv4

Joining such a massive company was an opportunity to step out of my comfort zone, work with some of the brightest minds and put my UX skills to the test. After spending the majority of my career focused on various forms of customer facing e-commerce, I was challenged with what seemed like learning an entirely new language as part of the Sales & Marketing Interfaces enterprise software team. I had to learn a completely new vocabulary of industry terms along with gaining an understanding of how the business works before being able to start designing. My team creates the software that the global sales team uses to generate 90% of the company’s total annual revenue. Needless to say, the enterprise applications are complex because the scale is so vast.
In my 7 months with the SMI team, the most interesting project that I drove was tasked with designing a new comprehensive Sales Forecasting experience to transform a global workflow that is manual and inconsistent into a unified consistent digital flow that lays the foundation for automation while increasing accuracy.
Product Design Lead • UX Research • UX Strategy

Forecasting Concept Design

Concept designs are great way to explore the potential for a project with fewer limits that helps us to shape a vision. Before starting from the begining of the design journey, I wanted to share a series of concept designs that reimagined an inconsistant manual global process into a unified digital experinence. The screen below shows how sales team managers are able to review a performance summary for their entire team as well as view and comment on each team member’s forecast.

Forecasting Concept: Total Book Overview

Independent contributing sales team members are able to review weekly forecasting revenue metrics for their total book of business(all of the clients they represent).

Forecasting Concept: Submit a forecast

Sales team members are able to review the hierarchy of advertiser metrics from a customizable dashboard and submit a forecast at every level for each client.

Forecasting Concept: Weekly Summary

Sales team members are able to compose their weekly forecast summary(HPM) from within a unified forecasting dashboard where they can also review the summary/status for each of their colleagues.

Forecasting Concept: Weekly Summary Metrics

At a glance, sales team members can see prioritized metrics that correspond with their weekly summary.

Forecasting Concept: History of Commentary

Sales team members are able to reference a history of weekly forecasting commentary from across the team hierarchy along side contextual performance data.

Design thinking plan

Research

Making the most of existing research helped us save time and identify what new research we needed to conduct.

Interview script

We met with over 20 sales team members to conduct stakeholder interviews and shadowing sessions.

Analyze and Consolidate research

Summarize key problems and potential solutions

I worked with product managers and engineering to work through identifying all of the key problems and potential solutions.

Documenting the sales team workflow

The forecasting workflow involved four distinct user roles that share a unified process. Gaining a detailed understanding of the entire existing workflow was an essential part translating the process into a holistic digital experience.

Documenting the sales team Journey

The complex interconnected journey of the 4 key roles required an extensive user journey to be mapped to best consume and understand the complete picture of the current experience.

Experience Sketching

Sketching is a rapid and efficient way to iterate before ever moving a pixel on screen. Sketching has always been a key component of my creative problem solving process.

Ideation Workshop with Product Managers and Engineering

An integral part of ideation and validation comes from harnessing the collective intelligence of your engineering and product team mates.

Wires

Phase 1 designs

The team was tasked with delivering value quickly. So we built out a series of charts to help fill prioritized needs dervived from our research efforts that engineering could execute quickly to deliver to users.

Phase 2 designs

For phase 2, we designed a robust forecasting dashboard that integrated the forecasting charts from phase 1. With this set of designs, we translated the sales team's existing forecasting process into a holistic digital journey.

User feedback

Phase 2 designs were used to conduct stakeholder reviews to quickly validate the experience and gather feedback to further polish the experience.

Phase 3 Designs

Phase 3 designs were focused on creating a vision for the future. We built off of the foundation that we laid while refining the aesthetic and pushing the UI boundaries a bit to show what could be possible.