Background
At Zendesk, I was the pivotal player in several high-key strategic projects, such as the Zendesk Suite project.
For the past few years, Zendesk had sold its software as standalone products. In early 2018, we wanted to start offering the Zendesk Suite, a bundle of products similar to the Microsoft Office bundle or the Adobe Creative Suite.
The primary goal was to highlight how well our products worked together seamlessly using one unified onboarding experience.
Cross-border communication
Zendesk has offices spread across the world, with each office taking responsibility for the development of one product. This presented various challenges in working together. For example, the timezone difference meant that San Francisco, Dublin and Singapore would never have an overlap at the same time.
We worked together with the programme management team to identify stakeholders and design the meetings. It wasn’t easy, but after a while we struck a good cadence.
Service Gaps: Customer Journey Map
Our customer journey map was instrumental in identifying the weak points in the sign up and conversion flow. Some key insights include:
- Gaps in the experience that the current plan (mostly backend engineering account provisioning) did not account for
- Highlighted that different parts of the conversion funnel are were owned by different teams with different tech stacks (the different colours on the map represents different teams)
- Overlapping email nurture campaigns
Data Analysis
This map was the perfect recipe to come up with some data research questions with the product managers and engineers. Together, we created a detailed map to investigate and plug in the numbers.
We used this data to identify the key activities that make a customer likely to convert. These will later become the backbone for the onboarding tasks.
We also analysed past performance of what I like to call “delivery mechanisms” such as onboarding modals to shortlist candidates for our onboarding experience.
Planning the Design Effort
Since it was such a complex project, I saw the need for some project management for the delivery of the solution.
To make sure we shipped on time, some of the planning artifacts I helped to create include:
- User story map — to help clarify and prioritise requirements
- A scope map of the design tasks — to aid in critical path analysis
- Delivery timeline
Usability Testing
Usability testing was not scoped in initially. Sensing danger, I advocated strongly for it with the team and convinced key stakeholders to invest in validating the design.
Presenting Insights
To communicate the usability findings effectively, I created highlight reels for the team to easily understand and justify modifications.
I also created templates for our designers to summarise the findings for each round:
Visual Design
The main visual design challenge was to communicate how each channel works during the onboarding. The design principle for us was to let the user learn by doing.
