Role
Co-led the project with Riya. Conducted research, designed intuitive flows, micro interactions and prototypes
Duration
4 months
( September to December 2022 )
Category
Web Application
Sector
Marketing, Engagement, Management
01/ Unisuite CRM tool
Unisuite is an in-house customer relationship management tool. It’s designed to offer a loyalty hub for a complete and robust view of customer interactions. It is expected to ensure personalised experiences when dealing with customers and prospects, eventually resulting in retention. The goal is to also engage our clients by making their journey easy.
Style Guide 🌈
Design System
To differentiate ourselves in an already mature and competitive market, we needed to define a desirable role for the application and how it would meet the needs of the users.
01 / Keep It simple
Since CRMs are functional software, use a UX first, easy to understand approach. This also included using natural language in otherwise complex products.
02 / Desktop First Approach
We identified that the majority of users will be accessing the platform through their desktop devices. We assessed different frameworks and UI libraries to find the most fitting solution in terms of speed and suitability for our project.
Underlying Assumptions 🫣
We were heavily reliant on assumptions since this was a new product and we did not have sufficient data to help us demystify the ambiguity in our approach.
Market Analysis 👩🏻💻
Understanding the competition
An analysis of other loyalty CRM and marketing automation softwares helped us zone in on a wide variety of directions we could. We took the time to familiarise ourselves with each niche feature, understand the context of the issue from our product perspective, and determine concrete concepts to share with other designers.
Scope 🔎
Vision: Break the market
To differentiate ourselves in an already mature and competitive market, we needed to define a desirable role for the application and how it would meet the needs of the users.
Exploration 🤔
Iterate, Iterate, Iterate
After referencing several of these software, we decided to follow the general rule of minimum color for less distractions, but also make the software stand out subtly with the type of UI elements used.
Approach 👀
Fail and Learn
Since we were in a time crunch, we had to move. Fast. As we did not have the budget for primary research, we opted for a comparative analysis.
This helped us identify noteworthy features, and avoid features/mistakes other softwares were possibly making.
An analysis of other loyalty CRM and marketing automation softwares helped us zone in on a wide variety of directions we could. We took the time to familiarise ourselves with each niche feature, understand the context of the issue from our product perspective, and determine concrete concepts to share with other designers.
Learnings 💡
Although our brief was to develop better functionality than the competitors, we stressed that engaging in a feature parity war was neither strategic, nor had the best interests of the app's users at heart.
01 / Sign-up to the CRM through an invitation link
This is your Schedule Item. Provide details about the event or activity, where it’s located and any other relevant information.
02 / Import or sync your contacts
This is your Schedule Item. Provide details about the event or activity, where it’s located and any other relevant information.
Focus Areas 👩🏻💻
Focus on the Features Journey
To differentiate ourselves in an already mature and competitive market, we needed to define a desirable role for the application and how it would meet the needs of the users.
03 / Create coupons to reward your customers
This is your Schedule Item. Provide details about the event or activity, where it’s located and any other relevant information.
04 / Engage customers through games and rewards
This is your Schedule Item. Provide details about the event or activity, where it’s located and any other relevant information.
05 / Create brand specific customised landing pages
This is your Schedule Item. Provide details about the event or activity, where it’s located and any other relevant information.
Learnings 🤓
Journey so far
This project was also an opportunity to have some fun with interactions and animations.
To not be hung up on an idea: We’ve gone through so many versions - It’s important to not hesitate to kill your babies. We debate amongst each other for the best idea. When we see a good idea, we take it; it's best for the product; it doesn't matter who it came from.
Prioritise experience over features: A startup means you have to make hard calls. You have to decide what to cut out to ship on time. We learnt this balance— while still sticking to quality. It worked well because people responded to our difference in quality.
Always collaborate with your developers to test feasibility of designs. We had many ideas - but only until later did we realise that we couldn’t push them through due to constraints or because it wasn’t efficient.
Future🔮
CRM v2 in the making
One thing we’ve been wanting to work on is making our designs more accessible: We did a course on accessibility while working on this project, and tried to seek areas where we could practise it.
If there was more time, we would probably try to test the designs with a few users. That way we’d have more confidence in our design decisions. A lot of the time, our ideas came from intuition and secondary research, but a design is never complete unless used by somebody.
We also wanted to improve the colour palette to create more contrast in the design. Testing our hypothesis might bring in more insights for new iterations.
“The best kind of design isn’t necessarily an object, a space, or a structure: it’s a process—
dynamic and adaptable.”
Don Norman