Act! Essentials Cloud CRM

UX & Design Lead

I designed Act! Essentials with the belief that all entrepreneurs strive to be the master of their craft. Under this ethos, I led Act!'s internal creative team through the design process. Together we researched, prototyped, tested, and deployed a new socially integrated CRM software optimized for young business owners and operators.

As the design lead, I modeled a human-centered design (HCD) methodology and promoted the merits of HCD within the organization. I invited not only designers, but marketers, developers, and department heads to participate in the creative process. 

Collaboration across departments was worth the effort. Coworkers from different groups offered their unique knowledge of the customer. These insights (i.e. customer lifecycle data, support ticket submissions, stories from the latest partner conference) were essential as we developed customer journeys, defined product features, and imagined new opportunities to delight Act! users. 

In order to understand, and validate our assumptions about Act! customers, I conducted preliminary interviews with local Act! users and small businesses. Interviews included questions intended to help my team and I identify the the customer's business goals, work routines, and their comfort level with mobile technology. We conducted interviews on-site as well as remotely.  

With insights from our interviews, as well as market research, we created light-weight personas that helped us sketch early design concepts. We used empathy maps, told humanizing stories and created a spectrum of traits representing the Act! customer profile. 

While conducting customer research, I paid attention to the way participants described their business practices and work life. From interviews, and by exploring small business websites and forums, I created a terminology map that helped our internal design and marketing departments classify product features in language familiar to our customers.

Storyboards helped us better understand the daily goals and challenges faced by our users. These day-in-the-life scenarios revealed the thoughts, feelings, and actions of users and helped our design team to share our vision with managers of Act!'s product and marketing teams. 

Standing out in a highly saturated CRM market is a challenge. After months of competitive analysis, we designed Act! Essentials as a mobile-friendly web app focused on the one-to-one relationships between sole-proprietors and their clients. We imagined a "flow of opportunity" as the single point of focus. In our design, a user's activity feed took center stage with contextually relevant information available for quick reference. 

In close collaboration with engineers, my team and I began the process of prototyping responsive interfaces. We combined tools such as Bootstrap, Axure RP, and InVision to create functional prototypes for user testing.

There were times when I had to jump in and help with the front-end development work. Our deadlines for product delivery were tight, and our engineering team needed to prioritize the development of the Act! Essential's API. I explored using both Bootstrap and Foundation as responsive front-end frameworks and settled on Bootstrap because it had a larger catalog of support documentation.

Unforeseen roadblocks and changes in business priorities shifted resources away from the Act! Essentials project. Rather than see it as a loss, I led an effort to use the completed Act! Essentials API to build the Act! Experience Platform, an API-driven model for future Act! CRM integrations and an online marketplace. It lives on today as Act! Connections.

Act! Essentials was originally released in September 2014 as Act! Cloud Beta, and later rebranded to its current name. It was given a UI overhaul, in July 2015. It's underlying technology still drives much of Act! SaaS offerings and remains the platform-level framework for new apps, integrations and business development partnerships.  

Challenges:

With Act! Essentials, I had my first opportunity to grow and develop an internal team of designers. We started as a team of two and grew to five over the course of several years. As I built my team, I confronted the challenge that designers, while sharing a craft, approach problem-solving in different ways. Each new team member reshaped the collaborative dynamic. As our team grew, I learned how to facilitate group creativity, foster trusting relationships, and develop shared processes.

Insights:

Building a product from the ground up requires collaboration with stakeholders across departments. I quickly learned that my ideas about product features and style were most useful when presented amidst open and honest dialogue. I learned to love the role of facilitator and took opportunities to help my coworkers engage in the creative process.