XcelPros is a next-generation document design tool powered by Microsoft Dynamics.
After releasing the MVP for early access testing, the results were poor — admins were spending 4-5 hours per day working directly with customers, and there was a lot of unsatisfactory feedback from users. Additionally, the founder wanted to visually update the UI.
Following the Double Diamond methodology, we embarked on an in-depth exploration to understand the root causes of excessive admin time consumption. Our journey began with insightful interviews, which allowed us to gather firsthand insights and uncover the challenges faced by our admins.
Through these interviews, we identified a crucial factor: we had not anticipated that admins would need to take on a support role, which significantly contributed to the unexpected increase in their workload. This realization became the foundation for forming our hypotheses.
Two distinct groups were formed: admins who had been recently registering a substantial amount of time and actively involved in customer support, and customers who had been in frequent contact with our admin team, whether on a recent or regular basis.
By actively listening to and empathizing with these stakeholders, we gained valuable perspectives and identified pain points and opportunities for improvement. Armed with these insights, we formulated hypotheses that aimed to address the challenges faced by admins and enhance the overall user experience within our system.
The hypothesis centered around the idea that if users were provided with more user-friendly UI, along with adding Assets panel will result in increasing efficiency and clarity.
This, in turn, would reduce their reliance on admin support and improve their overall self-sufficiency.
My hypothesis was that changing the navigation can add clarity and orrder to the usability, espesially after interviers thought that the search icon was related only to an opened page.
Both admins and users mentioned they had hard time communicating about the tools as they would use different words to describe thing thus labels were added.
Selected elements we previusly in red wich caused confussions with error, so blue was introdused.
After user interviews I've got to the conclusion that tool bar should be rearranged so most used features can be placed front and center.
Most feedback from user was about how important to have a quick access to their library of assets and layers from this information it was obvious that redesigning this panel is a top priority.
We selected a group of 12 customers, consisting of both individuals who were unaware of any issues with design mode and those who frequently encountered problems and sought assistance from administrators.
During the usability testing, we assigned various tasks related to different modules and scenarios that users typically encounter when creating a new design. We closely observed their performance and engaged in discussions to gain insights into their understanding, thoughts, and overall experience while completing the assigned tasks.
The results of the usability testing were highly encouraging. Approximately 10 out of the 12 customers demonstrated improved performance, efficiently completing the assigned tasks with minimal questions or uncertainties regarding the new flow of interaction in the design mode.
As a direct outcome of implementing our hypothesis in our SaaS B2B platform, we achieved a significant reduction in admin time consumption, with a maximum decrease of up to 3 hours per day (from the previous 4-5 hours per day). This reduction represents an impressive 40% decrease in time spent on customer support activities, demonstrating the tangible impact of our redesign.
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