Fields Sales App

Introduction

In 2018 after successfully delivering an app in 3 weeks, my team and I had the chance to work on our first NextGen mobile app. This is one of my favorite projects as we were the first team in the organization to deliver the first app using the brand new design system. My role was as a lead UX designer working with a team of 3 designers.

Context

Our design system was being build and our branding was recently been redesigned. We were asked to apply our expertise on building this app that could serve field agents for managing their sales opportunities on the field.

The Challenge

The existing app was given free to our customers with a CRM license, but it had less than 10% of adoption. We also had another important data point from our marketing via our Product Manager, it had a low average score in the App Store.

The goal was to increase the adoption rate at least 20% and of course to increase customer satisfaction.

We started doing competitive research and realized that all the key players were doing the same, a Calendar-based app. Actually, that was exactly what the old app was doing.

The app space was dominated by calendar based solutions.

Working together with my PM, I discovered that our company actually had 25,000 sales agents internally what let me asked for getting access to data from our Telemetry team, this team conduct mainly quantitative research.

90% of customer interaction happens over the phone, the most common action was to update the customer page after an appointment (adding a note, adding a phone number). 23% of users see manual data entry as the main challenge to using CRM.

Going beyond the quantitative data

I just had to find more answers through qualitative research to validate some of the insights from the telemetry data. So with the help of our PM we had the chance to contact 7 sales agents and conduct interviews with them.

One of the main features after having this findings was about supporting offline mode.

Some of the findings I made was that most of the sales representatives are traveling all the time, and one of the principal problems they have is that they often are without cell phone signal, most of their interactions happen over the phone and they need it to react to their client needs no matter where they are (even when there’s no connection at all).

After completing our research we started to build all the ideas we had to build use cases, I wrote these as story boards.

Time to Design

As I mentioned before when we started this project the design system was still being built, which means there weren’t existing components so my team and I had to define many of the mobile patterns.

Some of the patterns I explored for action buttons and filtering.

The main page will not only show a calendar and a list of clients, this was more task oriented.

We started to refine it and to work in different parts of the app, we divided and conquered.

Some of the flows in the main file, each one took ownership of one of the sections.

As the design system was still on development we were not allowed to use neither the branding colors, they wanted to do a big reveal of the new design system, we needed to start testing our product with existing and potential customer as well as promoting it. So we had to use an interim design system.

Finally the embargo of the design system was lifted and we could finally use it, we needed to adapt it to mobile as at that early release most of the components were oriented to desktop apps. Once again the opportunity to make an impact by influencing the mobile design patterns was there, and we did it.

After one and a half-year finally, our app was launched finally as a Pilot Test Program in 2020. It’s a continuous effort and as the design system continues evolving so does our design.