Having secured new venture capital funding as well as a range of new customers, the Connectr board decided to move to a SaaS business model to allow them to grow exponentially. This meant building a CMS to enable clients to manage Connectr products.
Connectr makes mentoring software, driving real results in DE&I, Retention and Engagement.
A white-label product, Connectr allows customers to add their own logo and brand colour to personalise the platform. Connectr has two web apps – one for candidate engagement and one for employee engagement. The features at the core of each app are ‘Mentors’ and ‘Modules’.
Lead Product Designer (me)
Product Manager
UX Researcher
Data Analyst
Front End Software Engineer x2
Back End Software Engineer x2
Design thinking
Task flows
Wireframes
UI design
Prototyping
User testing
One of the key pain points for current customers was the manual workflow for onboarding onto Connectr as well as creating content for the platform. This involved filling out forms and often quite time-consuming communication with the Connectr client teams, who estimated that the process accounted for 60% of the onboarding time.
At the time, the Connectr team managed all client products, using a poorly-designed admin system that took a while to get to grips with.
The project was to redesign the current experience and create something that customers could use with confidence, saving time and effort for both customers and internal teams alike.
The Connectr team use a ScrumBan methodology as their process which uses an ongoing Discovery and Research phase to help us find any potential issues or things to work on.
Our Product Manager set up interviews with current customers to learn what they wanted from an admin portal.
I reviewed the current admin experience and conducted a UX teardown, looking into the problem areas while highlighting successful parts of the experience.
Admin was built by developers with no UX thinking at all. It was built as and when things were needed. The lack of cohesion between features made the experience confusing at times.
Using the portal with no previous knowledge, I struggled to get to grips with it. Some of the developers knew the ins and outs as they’d used it for a while and had built it in the first place, but anyone joining the team faced a steep learning curve.
Ultimately the developers knew it needed to change but, to keep costs down, the first step was a redesign with as few backend changes as possible.
Our research and discovery phase had now shown us the key priorities for admin users and what our MVP experience was:
• Reporting – the ability to manage and review their Connectr platform
• Modules – the ability to create and manage content for their own users
• Dashboard – a homepage to bring everything together and hold important information and updates
• Users - a place to manage users, their permissions and roles
Since then, we have decided to remove the 'users' page from the MVP due to a change in business requirements and the need to advance the launch date. The team determined that we could easily manage this aspect for our clients. Based on user interviews, there was a greater need for reporting and a content editor for modules, which led to the decision to prioritise these features over the 'users' page.
With Reporting already built in as an add on to the current Connectr experience and Dashboard a relatively simple task, our focus turned to Modules and a Content Editor.
We ran design thinking workshops to allow the team to ideate around these MVP features for admin, and to map out the full customer experience.
Having decided to focus on Modules, we got back together in a workshop and used some ideation techniques to generate ideas. We sketched out our ideas and combined them until we had the beginnings of a concept for the Content Editor.
Next, we defined the roles and permissions for the types of users who would be using the product and the admin experience. From these users we defined user tasks based on the MVP experience and mapped out user flows to outline how everything fits together. The sign up flows (shown here) was one of the more complicated set of flows as we had to consider how the product communicated with the admin experience in the back end and consider user permissions and roles*.
*This was for the ‘Users’ page in admin which ended up being removed from the MVP experience as mentioned before.
I then went through a rigorous design > test > learn > repeat phase to iterate and refine. The Content Editor for Modules went through over ten rounds of feedback and testing as it’s a complicated feature. It started life as wire frames before gradually moving into UI.
For testing I designed a user flow in Figma, such as ‘create a task’, and then created a prototype ready for testing. These flows started as wireframes and gradually moved into UI as we iterated. I would run testing with the Product manager using Zoom. We then gained further feedback by testing the prototype with clients or colleagues in the business (at this stage there was no budget for a UX Researcher or external testing agencies).
The concept of ‘Modules’ is key to the product. It is a learning feature which consists of content ‘Tasks’ covering different subjects, each with several snackable ‘Parts’. We refer to this feature as 'MTP' (Modules > Tasks > Parts). Knowing its complicated, but integral, structure we knew we had to explain it to users it a clear and visual way. Below you can see a visual we created to explain the MTP concept.
I'm extremely proud of what we've built as an MVP and can't wait to get more of our clients using it. As always in Product Design, it's an ever evolving experience and design, so I'm looking forward to the next iteration.
Although the feature only launched recently, we have some early statistics and feedback indicating that the content editor feature and admin portal in general have been a success.
This was a fantastic learning experience for me as it was the largest feature I’ve ever worked on. In hindsight we could have simplified the MVP further. However we were pleased with the end result and we are confident it will have a very positive impact on the business.
