TextUs is a leading software that gives its users another channel of communication for their candidates, customers, and contacts with web-based texting. Taking conversations out of email and phone calls, users a higher response rate which leads to a better conversion rate. TextUs offers its users a webapp, native mobile app, and Chrome Extension.

Leadership

Led a team of one Junior UX and one Mid-Level UX designer

My Role

Research, user interviews, user flows, information architecture, wireframes, prototyping, user testing, UI, feature prioritization, roadmap creation, UX team management and creation

The Team

Executive team, director of product, engineering & architecture, data & analytics, sales, account managers, customer experience

Platforms

Responsive web, Chrome Extension, iPhone app, Android app

TextUs offers its users a webapp, native mobile app, and Chrome Extension. There are numerous integrations with other systems to to improve its customers workflows.

When I first started, we were nearing the end of migrating all of our customers over from a “Legacy” platform to “TextUs Next.” The new development and migration process had been going on for quite a while. Legacy was a very barebones version of what is live today. There was also a Chrome Extension and mobile app for legacy - both barebones as well. The new platform was conceptualized to give customers more features, a better overall user experience, and a more scalable way to generate new revenue.

The only problem - there was no UX, research, or testing involved with the design and creation of the new platform.

From the lack of UX and customer input, the final product had a lot of gaps in terms of usability, product vision, and there was no design strategy for how to scale in the future. Customers themselves weren’t happy with the update and it was apparent in app store reviews, NPS survey feedback, and overall customer sentiment on calls.

I was TextUs’ first design hire and was tasked with creating a UX department, a design system, and establish a UX process to ensure we are building the right thing for the right reasons at the right time.

UX Team Creation

Building the UX department was step 1 to getting our customers back on our good side.

Since I was the first design hire, it was important to gain trust and buy-in throughout the company for the importance of UX involvement and process.

What better way than to do that with a Chuck Norris meme? I led lunch and learns for UX 101, held open office hours, and tried to communicate as best as possible what UX is. I also tried to make it clear that UX is not just about making something look pretty and no, I do not use Microsoft Paint.

The first thing I did was create a component library and design system to easily be able to scale and build out a UX team. My goal was to be able to consistently create deliverables to engineering that looked like it came from the UX team and not an individual designer. Having that consistency also makes it easier for designers to jump right in and pick up where someone else left off. I also created documentation including a description of the tools and software we use, naming conventions, our process, etc. to allow new designers to have a handbook to look up questions in.

I defined how UX interacts with the rest of the departments in the company. There are many people in the company that have unique interactions with our customers that UX doesn’t get, so we needed a process to get the same customer feedback everyone else receives.

Working closely with product and engineering, I was also responsible for setting up a process to let everyone have visibility to what UX is working on and where in the process it is. From that view, I was able to manage the UX workload, assign stories to certain designers, and plan ahead for what we have coming down the pipeline.

To start gathering feedback, I set up an in-app NPS survey to gather sentiment and feedback from users. I found there was a lot of the same feedback being given, which led to prioritizing new features or enhancements that necessarily weren’t on the roadmap. It was great to see the direct correlation between our score and the timing of new releases. It was also exciting watching our score go from over -20 to steadily hanging out above 30 which is SaaS industry average.

UX is unique in the fact that it interacts heavily with every department in the company. Part of my role was to establish how UX collaborates and works with all other departments.

EXECUTIVE TEAM

The executive team is heavily involved with product planning and the overall product vision and roadmap. UX collaborates closely by bringing research and customer feedback to meetings to help influence and guide the prioritization of brand new features or enhancements and the overall roadmap. This makes sure what we are building is correct and going to be valuable for the user and able to generate new revenue. We shouldn’t be building something just to build it.

ENGINEERING

The engineering team is who UX works the closest with. Throughout the entire product and UX process, engineering is involved to give their viewpoint on if the direction UX is headed is feasible or not. Architecture is also heavily involved so we can learn from a technical perspective what would be the best direction to go in. UX is responsible for creating deliverables to hand-off, including annotations, redlined UI and clickable prototypes, to ensure it gets built correctly.

PRODUCT

UX falls under the product team. Product and UX review new feedback and the UX backlog and start doing discovery to figure out what should be prioritized. For new 0-1 features, product will run discovery sessions to validate there is a need for the feature and people will use it. UX then gets involved and helps gather the finalized requirements to begin the UX process and help phase releases for engineering. Product is involved every step of the way.

CUSTOMER EXPERIENCE

The customer experience team is a great resource for UX. Unhappy or frustrated customers usually reach out to support and it is a great way to see what troubles users are having and if multiple users are having the same ones.

DATA & ANALYTICS

Data & analytics is a great tool for our users. There are multiple data points can be utilized to send better texts and improve their overall workflow. UX works with the data & analytics team to figure out what is the best way to display the data in the interface.

ACCOUNT MANAGERS

Account managers have a great relationship with our customers and so does UX because of that. They are a great asset to set up customer interview and feedback sessions as well as relaying back customer feedback and their wants to UX and product.

SALES

A new feature isn’t that valuable if it can’t be sold. Sales is a great team to help with feature prioritization to make sure that we are releasing things that will help with closing deals. They also have a unique interaction with prospective customers who are demoing with our competitors to give UX and product feedback for whats working, what’s confusing, and what competitors are currently offering that we aren’t.

Planning & Strategy

Working closely with the executive and product team, UX has a lot of input with 0-1 new features, enhancements and overall product vision and roadmap. UX brings feedback from interviews, NPS surveys, opportunity assessments submitted internally from other team members to help guide product and design strategy. Based on weekly product planning meetings, items get prioritized or ice-boxed and saved for later.

Two good examples of how UX played a big part in how and when something new was prioritized, was the complete redesign and build of our native mobile app and Chrome Extension. We found that the 3 products we offer - webapp, mobile app, and Chrome Extension - have 3 very different use cases and should be designed specifically for them. Originally all 3 products were just a responsive version of the full webapp, but that didn’t provide the best user experience or performance.

MOBILE APP

A mobile app redesign wasn’t on the roadmap until Q4 of 2021, but based on repeated customer feedback and poor app store reviews, we were able to reprioritize for an early release of Q1 2021.

The old mobile app was a scaled down version of the full webapp. There were many instances of text being too small to read, icons and buttons being too small to tap on, and an overall poor user experience since we were just scaling down the full webapp onto a mobile device.

Based on customer interviews and research, we were able to uncover that users don’t use all the features we offer on the webapp based on their use cases and just an overall limitation of a mobile device. We were able to do a complete redesign to build a native iOS and Android app with paired down features to improve performance and user experience.

CHROME EXTENSION

When the new “TextUs Next” platform was being built, the Chrome Extension was completely redesigned as well. The “Legacy” version was a slide out drawer that users were able to open on certain webpages. The new extension was a popout which made users switch back and forth between windows - not an easy task if a user is on a single monitor.

Based on customer interviews and research we were able to discover many users liked the old user experience of the slide out much better. We were also able to see there was a unique use case for the Chrome Extension as well. Again like the mobile app, users were never using all the features of the webapp offered.

We were able to do another complete redesign of the Chrome Extension to bring it back to the slide out version. I used the same UI as the mobile app to keep the UX/UI patterns consistent to limit learning curves and also make it easier on engineering to only one have UI library to maintain across the 2 products.

Process, Process, Process!

Being the first design hire, there was no UX process in place. Part of my role was to establish and define a UX process and finalize the product process to define how it works with UX.

After a few releases that followed this Product/ UX process, we were able to quickly see what we were releasing was correct and making our customers happy. We quickly the importance of following a process to ensure what we were designing and building was correct and going to be able to be used by our users.

An initiative we started, was creating a customer council. We gathered a group of users that fit multiple user personas and that consistently gave us good feedback. They are a great resource to bounce ideas off of, conduct testing sessions with and gather ideas of what new features or enhancements would help their workflow. A process was created to identify 4 types of sessions, when to conduct them in the Product/ UX process and who should be involved internally.

I also identified a need to created a post-launch, validation process. We were releasing new features and enhancements and not validating what we released actually works and is correct. I established a process of how to gather feedback and take that data collected to help create a roadmap for the future.

Read a more in-depth description of the process I follow here.

There is so much I worked on that I couldn’t choose just one thing to go into an in-depth, case study of to show how I followed the process above. To dive into that a little deeper, check out other projects in my portfolio!

New Offerings

I have been heavily involved with the conception, prioritization, design and implementation of 3 brand new, add-on offerings to add to TextUs’ revenue.

I’ll tell you they’re pretty cool, but haven’t been released yet so I can’t show them here just yet. You’ll just have to take my word for it.

(I’ll add them as soon as they’re launched!)

Challenges

There were quite a few challenges with getting the UX team up and running. The first just being gaining trust and showing the importance of having UX involved in the design and creation of a platform and features. Creating a team and managing the workload to keep up with engineering and future roadmap items was also a challenge, but the kinks got ironed out and a process fell into place.

When I first started, I was “working backwards” for quite awhile. I did a full UX/UI audit of all 3 products and put together a backlog of UX enhancements. There were also many questions of “why” and “when” something was built and designed to work the way it did. From that original audit, I was able to bring my findings to product planning to start prioritizing a strategy of overall user experience improvement.

There were many gaps that I identified as a poor user experience because there was no testing or user input considered in the new platforms creation. The new platform was not adopted as well as the “Legacy” version and because of that we were consistently getting negative feedback from our customers. By setting up the NPS survey and involving customers more in our design and roadmap creation, we were able to start getting positive feedback and have a more solid product vision and strategy.

I found there was a few inconsistencies with the Frontend since there was never a single source of truth design system or component library. I also uncovered many places where the UI was not ADA complaint and I brought those findings to product planning to get prioritized…no one wants to be sued over an easy color ratio fix.

Overall, creating a team from scratch, defining process’, and managing workload has been a challenge from the start, but rewarding to see users happy and excited about new releases.

I know I’m a designer so I’m expected to say this, but UX involvement is really is important!

Seeing where the new platform was almost 2 years ago and where it is today with having more customer input, it really drives home how important testing and discovery work is.

To be able to see the correlation between a really great and valuable release and the increase in our NPS score is awesome to watch.

It has been rewarding to be able to come into a company as a first hire and build out a department that has become an integral part to our product process. It’s also been great to be able to watch the UX team grow and collaborate with the rest of the company more by the day.

Overall, the number one thing I learned was: building a department and team is hard work, but rewarding to see it pay off with positive reviews and feedback from new releases!