Building Compass, GUIDEcx’s customer portal for end users
Product overview
GUIDEcx is the leading client onboarding and project management platform that makes it simple to invite, guide, and engage internal and customer teams on a project.
My role
The GUIDEcx product team is split into 3 main pillars - Human, Trust, and Wisdom. I was the lead designer for the Human team, but my work has spanned to touch every aspect of our product pillars.
Primary work
I primarily focused on our end customer experience and the communication between our providers and their customers. My main project at GUIDEcx is Compass, our customer portal, which makes it simple for our customers (or as we call them, Providers) to interact with their customers. Compass provides visibility into onboarding and implementation projects and gives context to customers on what they need to do to move projects along.
Aside from Compass, I have worked on several other projects such as internal tooling for GuideCX employees, a design system overhaul, and navigational/information architecture changes to our main provider portal.
Background
As a product designer at a smaller startup, we’re often expected to wear many hats. Not only have I donned my product designer cap, I also have been a: UX researcher, content writer, technical writer, UI designer, product manager, and even front-end engineer. My knowledge and depth of work at GUIDEcx has expanded to touch almost every aspect of our product.
GuideCX is driven by our guiding pillars of “Human”, “Trust”, and “Wisdom”, which I have based most of my design decisions and directions off of.
I focus specifically on the “Human” pillar as the lead designer over our customer portal, “Compass.” I have spearheaded Compass from inception, to release, to continuous feature updates.
Process
Our product and design process at GUIDEcx is based on the 5Ds framework. We aim to incorporate the key phases of Discover, Define, and Design plus Develop and Deliver. As a design team, we also focus on the Empathize, Define, Iterate, Prototype and Test phases as tools used within the Double Diamond approach
Enabling Customer Engagement
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Retain providers by helping customers engage consistently with their projects
Drive meaningful customer engagement early and often
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Have 90% of providers add customers to GUIDEcx.
Increase the rate of customer visits to GUIDEcx.
Decrease the time that it takes for providers to add customers to GUIDEcx.
Give customers autonomy and visibility into projects
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Not clear what work customers need to do
Providers don't have a clear way of communicating work to customers
No warm handoff
Customers lose engagement with GCX
Providers aren't using GCX to hold customers accountable
Our legacy provider application is often too robust or complex for customers and difficult to learn
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Make it easier for providers to add customers to projects.
Make it easier for customers to add customers to projects.
Enable providers to make GUIDEcx their own.
Enable providers to collect customer data through GUIDEcx.
Customize communication between Providers and Customers
Make it easier for customers to engage and use GUIDEcx
Streamline this process for them
The Team
1 designer (thats me!)
1 product manager
5-8 developers
1 QA engineer
Exploratory and intro research
This project was born out of the identification of a major problem in the GUIDEcx application - we were heavily focused on provider success, but failed to address the second half of client onboarding and implementations: our customer’s customers. Communication between our providers and their customers was lacking - we heard several reports of customers not engaging with our platform due to a lack of visibility into what tasks they needed to complete, when, and who to talk to. We have an entire team dedicated to onboarding our providers onto the GUIDEcx platform, and found that customers felt confused and overwhelmed when asked by providers to sign up and begin using GUIDEcx for their projects.
How might we encourage end customer users to engage with their project managers and complete tasks and projects on time?
Gathering Insights
I used feedback submitted by providers via ProductBoard and Adobe, Heap, and Domo analytics data to drive further primary research as well as generative research through the use of user interviews and onsite observations for contextual feedback. My work focused on extensive research into the main problem of why providers were not inviting customers to their projects, and if they were, why they were not seeing high levels of engagement. I heard the same sentiment from every provider I spoke to: the GUIDEcx application was fantastic for their needs, but too robust and often too revealing for their customers. Providers were hesitant to invite customers to their GUIDEcx instance. Some standout reasons included:
There was too much information unrelated to the customer or their specific project
It was unclear what a customer needed to do to move a project forward
It was unclear what a customer would see versus an internal provider
Providers wanted a simpler way to communicate to their customers and give them a quicker, simplified view into the project
Productboard Insights
From these insights, it was clear that our application was too robust for most customer needs. We quickly identified 4 main questions for a customer persona:
What do I need to do?
Customer users need to clearly see what tasks they are responsible for in the project and the details of each task.
When do I need to do it?
There should be visibility into due dates and clearly set expectations on how long tasks will take.
Who do I go if I run into problems?
In case of any questions or concerns, users should be able to easily and readily communicate with their project managers or points of contact.
How do my tasks fit into the overall project?
Customer users can see their tasks and understand the impact their portions have on project health.
From these main questions, the initial idea of our customer portal was created with the purpose to streamline communication between providers and their customers. I worked alongside my product manager to speak with providers and their customers to understand what functionality from our application they would like to see in a customer portal, what was unnecessary, and ultimately what they cared about for successful, healthy projects.
Early Concepting
This started out with several FigJam files for mindmapping, creating user flows, and general navigational items critical to the customer portal. As a full team (product manager, product designer, engineers, and QA), we had two user story mapping sessions where we mapped out the ideal functionality for Compass to generate the most delightful user experience.
I moved onto sketches that quickly turned into fast and scrappy low fidelity wireframes to put in front of our providers. I consistently got feedback from providers and spoke with roughly 10 providers on early concepts for the today page and task modal. During this time, I also connected with several of the engineers on the customer portal team. By keeping them involved in the early stages and looping them in on where the designs were, they were able to see wireframes and understand if what I was creating would be out of scope and if we would need to scale back work for a summer (Q2) release.
Following user research and extensive usability testing, I moved onto a proof of concept for Compass. This involved a mid to high fidelity prototype that was tested with several GUIDEcx providers and internal employees. With feedback from those tests, we had a great jumping off point to begin official work on Compass.
Compass allows for customer users to actively engage in and view the status of projects by updating and completing required tasks as well as communicating with their main point of contacts without all the extra features of our provider application. Compass provides key insights into how a project is moving, what needs to be done, when, how, and who to talk to if something is going wrong.
Iterations of low-fidelity wireframes were presented to several GUIDEcx providers to validate the design direction and requirements for a successful customer tool. Mid fidelity prototypes were used to demonstrate core functionality within the Compass application.
If the user has completed all their tasks, they would still be able to track how their project is doing and leave notes, upload attachments, etc.
The “Today” page would serve as the landing page - displaying vital project information such as upcoming and in flight tasks that both the customer and provider are working on - answering the “What do I need to do?” and “When” questions from the get go.
The project overview or task modal would display vital information related to the project and the customer’s individual tasks. They would be able to communicate with their provider point of contacts as well as see how their tasks fit into the overall project.
July 2022
Compass beta release
Compass Release Timeline
Compass was released to our providers in a beta phase in July 2022. Following some significant scope cuts, Compass was released with the core functionality of the today page, task modal, and project switcher.
Within the task modal, customers could upload files, add task notes, and mark tasks as in progress, stuck, or done.
Jan 2023
Navigation & design system updates
After tracking for several months, we found that customers who were using Compass were engaging (changing task status, adding notes, etc) at a 2.2x higher rate than customers in our provider application, but providers were still hesitant to invite customers to Compass due to a lack of extensive functionality and a cohesive design system. This update encompassed (pun intended 😉) an update to our new unified Timber design system, more user customization settings, and an update to side bar and primary navigation.
Feb 2023
Compass goes mobile responsive
One major problem with our legacy provider application and previous design system was a lack of mobile responsive components. Compass wasn’t released as mobile friendly - this was cut back from the scope due to the July 2022 release and got pushed to the sidelines for other initiatives. February marked all aspects of Compass being mobile responsive for all the most common breakpoints.
April 2023
Compass fully adapts to the Timber DS
April marked Compass making the full switch to our new design system Timber, allowing for developers and designers both to stop maintaining 3 separate systems (our legacy provider app, the Compass application, and our new system) at once and migrate all of our patterns, fonts, colors, etc to Timber.
Summer 2023
Additional Functionality and Pages Added
Q2 and through the end of Q3 proved to be a busy quarter for us. We released project level notes, project level attachments, and added in functionality for customers to add new users to Compass as well as reassign tasks.
Success Metrics
Providers with 3+ users in Compass have a 71% on time project completion rate - 5 or more have 91%
3,000+ active monthly users in Compass, 10,000 monthly users total in our applications
Customers in Compass engage at a 2.2x higher rate than customers in our legacy provider application
Ideal Future Targets
22% of our providers have 3 or more customers in Compass - we want this to be 33% by the end of the year
79 providers utilizing Compass for their customers - want this to be 126 by the end of the year
I have plenty on my docket for updates to Compass. Our next major initiative will be our customer team builder, which will allow for providers and customers alike to invite vital team members to their projects. Additionally, I’m also working on view as functionality for providers to get insight into what their customers will see both before a project starts and while it is in flight.
What’s next?
Results and Takeaways
After the Compass V1 release, GUIDEcx has seen a 2.2x increase in customers who engaged with Compass rather than our legacy application geared toward our providers. Providers who have Compass turned on for their customers see a higher rate of engagement in task status updates and completion and communication via notes.
Since our initial release, we have iterated several times and updated Compass with new features such as the ability for customers to add other users to a project and reassign tasks if needed.
Compass customer engagement (updating task statuses, uploading attachments, adding task notes, etc) is 33% higher than customers who continue to use the GUIDEcx legacy application built for our providers. We have also seen a significant increase in positive feedback around the customer experience, and have found that projects where 3 or more users are added to a project have a 91% on-time completion rate.
Overall, the initial release of Compass plus additional enhancements have saved our providers time and increased the pleasurability of interacting with their customers and completing projects. This is just the beginning of the customer team’s ongoing efforts to continue to enhance and delight our users as we strive to build the best onboarding and implementation software in the game.
We are continuing to track Compass engagement and have seen a consistent upward trend as more providers and customer users utilize our customer application. My current initiatives are around improving the provider experience for inviting customers to Compass by identifying key players in a project in what we are calling “Customer Team Builder”.
Want to learn more about recent work at GUIDEcx?
Reach out to me at noa.michelle.tamir@gmail.com to set up a call!