Designing an omnichannel communication platform

to deepen customer and business relationships

Context

Instaply is a customer support platform which directly solves the real-world pain of calling for support: finding the number, navigating the phone tree, waiting on hold, disconnects, and wasted time on both ends.

With Instaply, customers can use push-enabled rich-media channels like SMS, in-app chat, and web chat widgets to message businesses – helping un-tie them from their phone when waiting for a reply.

The platform gives businesses a turnkey solution to enable all modern messaging channels, integrated into their existing apps and websites. They can then respond to customers efficiently from Instaply’s cross-platform “triage” interface which consolidates and automates all of the channels together – enabling them to build stronger relationships with their customers.

As the sole Lead UX Designer, I drove our design process from research to prototype to handoff and launch, including full redesign of our mobile and web interfaces based on our research interviews.

Role

Product UX Designer

Team Size

20 Member Team,
Solo UX Designer

Project Timeline

7 Months

Impact & Results
  • 140% Faster support triage task-completion
    + 2x Regained messaging screen real-estate
     after my usability and ergonomics UI audit and triage system redesign
  • 20x Customer engagement increase of daily message volume during my time on the project
  • 3x New channel integrations added
 including SMS, voice-to-text, and in-app chat SDK, which I flow-mapped and wireframed
  • 5x Adoption increase of active stores
 using our platform during my time on the project
  • In-Context feedback capture system
 which I hand-coded, to both dog-food our system and track impact on our new feature rollouts

Highlights of my work are below – get the full story on research, design process, and solutions in the case study.

View Instaply Case Study

Research & Discovery

Quantitative & Qualitative Research

When I joined the team, one of my first projects was to audit our quantitative metrics reporting systems, and then iterate on how we could better evaluate performance and impact.

I performed 1-on-1 user interviews and over-the-shoulder observational studies, recording points of delight and stress for our core tasks and workflows. I conducted these studies on-site at our pilot and perspective businesses’ headquarters and support centers across France, Belgium, and Spain.

Persona Generation & Journey Maps

I created a customer map showing who our product reached, and collaborated with leadership to select our core target personas. Each persona defined vision statements, key needs, goals, and tasks which directly referenced findings from our observational research.

As the sole UX designer on the team, I led knowledge-sharing meetings and included “tl;dr” callouts on all of my design artifacts to pinpoint why and how each design component fit into our overall product solution.

Principles

Product principles based on our user research were created and used focus our decision-making back on the needs of our business and consumers.

IA & Flow Development

Based on my usability audit’s findings, I generated an information architecture map that surfaces high-value functions and simplifies where/which components that are essential to flow completion.

My objective was to reduce redundancy and boost navigability of our platform’s core screens and flows.

Final Solutions

1

Mobile App Redesign

What if our mobile app was simpler, faster, and easier to learn, but had more functionality?

Informed by our research findings, app store reviews, and our upcoming feature rollouts, my first initiative focused on creating a new IA & UI foundation for our mobile product.

UI Reachability Auditing

Initial auditing included ergonomics testing for our consumer and retailer mobile apps. 
The consumer app’s restructured UI places the most important elements in the most reachable areas of the screen, with a new IA model that optimizes navigation and screen usage together.

Rapid Interactive Prototyping

Interactive prototypes were built in mid- and high-fidelity prototypes for task, interaction and affordance testing. As I iterated, I discovered new ways to surface information, such as introducing a lower-elevation store/metrics drawer shown underneath the customer list.

Final Solution

The new interface features a modern navigational structure, a cleaner UI, and tighter focus on our users’ primary triage task.

2

Webapp Redesign

What if our platform could help support agents coordinate effort, resolve issues faster, and connect more deeply with their customers?

I led the webapp redesign for our Support Agent segment, collaborating with our Eng team to uncover user painpoints and facilitating group ideation sessions to solve for them.

Once product requirements were prioritized, I prototyped potential solutions across a spectrum of fidelities, user tested prototype candidates, iterated on them, scaled features to fit with Eng capacity, and finalized work into per-feature components for gradual rollout.

These solutions are live on the platform today, and have helped Instaply rapidly increase customer volume from 10K to +10M messages daily.

Iteration & Wireframing

This early wireframe shows a timeline model for the customer thread, with a private message interface for support agents.

Final Prototype Design

It was critical to retain the overall content structure and simplicity of the original design, as we already had a multitude of enterprise brands using it worldwide. We released our changes into production gradually, evaluating each component in the live product for usage and usability impact.

For our public release, we successfully launched the new Invisible Thread area, deeper customer search and sorting, at-a-glance metrics displayed in context, and the improved and more consistent IA model.

3

Follow-Through:
Defining Key Metrics & Evaluation Tools

What if we could measure our impact of new features, and gather input from customers in-context?

When I joined the team, I surveyed and organized our existing usage metrics gathered in our products. This revealed our primary source of data: sifting server log data to monitor usage.

After discovering this, I set out to build enthusiasm for a more robust product evaluation approaches: quantitative and qualitative, at different altitudes of evaluation.

Metrics Strategy Development

I worked with the team to develop a list of metrics, from essential to “challenge” levels, which we would use to evaluate current product, new releases, and overall business performance.

At-Rollout Feedback Gathering

As a passion project, I coded a qualitative survey widget to capture feedback in-context when users tried our new features and designs. It led to a new practice during our engineering standups: reviewing our incoming customer feedback and create quick-win solutions that could fit into the engineering team’s sprint.

Get the full story – research, design process, solutions and more in the case study.

View Instaply Case Study