Launched a project management feature that expands D-Tools Cloud features beyond sales product to an enterprise solution.
This project would expand current D-Tools Cloud product beyond sales features to an enterprise solution, enabling D-Tools Cloud customers to plan and execute on their won opportunities to project completion.
Give our customers a way to manage their projects.
And grow our number of users per customer account.
Product Designer and Product Manager
2020
D-Tools Cloud is a SaaS product that enables system integrators to build a quote of materials and labor, design and engineer the project systems, and send digital proposals to their end clients to win the opportunity.
Sell
Quote, bid, and present proposals with the goal of winning contracts
Install
Turning won opportunities into projects and executing on them
Service
Sending service reps to service a previous project
Adding features for project managers and installers to plan and execute on projects will increase product adoption and increase the number of users per customer account.
Add
Project Management Features
Increase
Users per Account
&
Increase
Adoption Rate
We had our company vision and hundreds of requests from our users, but I wanted to really find out what this meant for both our stakeholders, and more importantly our users.
Starting with internal subject matter experts, then moving to early adopter users, and then expanding to more of our user base. I spoke with over 15 companies from a variety of company sizes with different user types.
What does your project installation process look like?
Who is involved in the process of a project?
What tools do you use today to solve this problem?
After speaking with our customers, I found there are two primary personas and three secondary personas involved in the project management process.
Description:
Patrick put in his time as a field tech and has 10 years of experience working in the space. He instructs the technicians what to work on and where to go on a daily basis, he requests items for order through purchasing, and provides the sales and business members with status updates.
Goals:
He is responsible for making sure everything gets done, on time, and under budget. He wants to easily manage changes from the client. He is not responsible for doing any of the work, just facilitating. Wants a software that he can live in, helping him solve all these challenges.
Description:
A few years experience installing audio and video systems in homes. He is the one doing all the actual work. High school educated, he is hourly and usually told what to do on a day to day basis. Reports to project manager and communicates daily updates and issues.
Goals:
Get the work done in the allotted project manager’s time estimation. He wants to understand the whole project and where everything goes, so he can achieve the PM’s goals. Frank wants a place where he can see what he needs to do, and easily communicate back reports to the PM.
Pauline supports the PMs by making sure items are ordered on time for installers to install.
Steve won the project, he wants to make sure it goes smoothly and the client is happy.
Chris wants status updates to make sure his home is going to turn out how he requested.
Designing out their customer journey and the project journey is very important for making sure we include all the proper requirements to fully understand their needs and goals, and to define requirements and an MVP.
During our research, we got a nice list of competing products our customer were using as well as other softwares that we could use as inspiration for design. This helped us understand requirements, pain points, and opportunities.
Industry Products: Integrators use these tools since they are willing to pay for everything in one place. However they lack the ease of use of larger non-industry products, and are much more expensive.
Non-Industry Products: Integrators use these tools since they are inexpensive, have a mobile app that works well for their installer, and easy to use. They miss out on detailed project information but get by with adding pdf attachments.
Finding The Right Combination: We want to build a product that has the ease of use and flexibility as the non-industry products, with our advantage of having the project details already imported in our system.
Talking to users and researching the tools they use, we were able to identify a list of feature ideas and then scale these down into a MVP.
Being heavily involved in the early research, I had a pretty good idea of what our users wanted. Even though I had a great baseline, I continued to reach out to our users during the design process to perfect the final feature.
We already had an app with some post-sale project features, but we had to figure out how to fit that into the existing work flow to make the experience fluid with the new features.
Starting with sketches and eventually wireframes, I was able to get early feedback from internal stakeholders and a couple customers while being able to quickly iterate on the design. I also involved the engineering team at this stage so they could provide feedback and be involved early in the project.
Using Sketch and Invision, moved to interactive screens, which allows usability tests to validate our project management feature, but also gather feedback on the usability and visual design of the feature.
Originally we had used sidebar to slide out with the task information. Through our testing, we found it was too small for the amount information on a task. We tested three ideas based on what we saw in other tools. We pulled stakeholders, co-workers, and friendly customers for user testing.
Pros: It is light weight, can quickly jump between tasks, with a similar mobile experience.
Cons: It’s hard to fit all the information on this small sidebar without using tabs or very long tasks.
Pros: Still felt light weight, and easy to jump to, could fit more information on the page, modal didn't cause a full context switch.
Cons: It didn't have the same light weight feel as the sidebar.
Pros: Full height and width to dedicate for the task.
Cons: This felt heavier, more context switching, and more difficult to switch between tasks.
And the Winner is…
B) Full Height Modal
We felt this was the right balance between room for information and being able to quickly jump between tasks, and our user testing confirmed these suspicions.
Being heavily involved in the early research, I had a pretty good idea of what users wanted, but I didn’t let that stop me from continuing to reach out during the design process to perfect the final feature.
Page for Project Managers to live where they can:
Each task will include details provided by project managers:
Installers can view task details in a mobile view so they can use in the field:
Project dashboard for the project manager to stay up to date, including:
Below are some examples of user stories which include both feature and design requirements. All user stories will include acceptance criteria with Invision prototypes which the engineers can use to work towards a specified product.
Each user story includes design specifications to make sure the engineering team has exactly what they need to get the product to match the mocks. This includes Invision prototype links with Inspect mode and calling out spacing to be consistent with the rest of the app, Below is an example of calling out pixel padding and alignment.
Final testing after engineering is done to make sure the code meets design standards, and last chance to validate the feature before we launch.
As the owner of the feature, I train internal team members on how the feature works and help support them in marketing, selling, and supporting the new feature.
Using Mixpanel, we setup events to track the adoption of this feature, and create dashboards to track its success.
Users Per
Customer Account
Adoption
* We are in the final stages of launching this project, but these are the expected results of the project.
Remain Agile
Be ready to adapt, our MVP changed multiple times during this process, and being agile and flexible makes it easy to modify.
Stay Focused - Taking on a big project, there were so many feature possibilities and it felt overwhelming. Once listed and organized in ProductBoard, it became easy to stay focused.
Over Communicate - When working on a feature or product that has been a company vision for years, there is a lot of passion and opinions. Over communication provided transparency and earned stakeholder confidence to work efficiently and achieve our goal.
Ethnographic Studies During a Pandemic
With COVID-19 and dealing with hourly employees, we were only able to talk to a few installers. We had to rely on project managers and past installers for their experience. Offering incentive would have allowed us to better understand this user.
Early Survey
We felt confident our qualitative research achieved the users needs, but surveying our user base would have given us a better estimate on user adoption across a wider audience.
Expanded D-Tools Cloud beyond a sales product and into an end-to-end project management solution
Added a set of customer reports, implementing a design system for future reports.
Added a set of customer reports, implementing a design system for future reports.
