Greyfox AI
Platform redesign + onboarding and self-serve strategy
SCOPE
TEAM
1 designer,
2 product managers,
2 developers
1 data scientist
1 marketing lead
1 CEO
ROLE
Research
Usability Testing
UX Design
UI Design
SOFTWARE
Figma
Notion
FigJam
THE PLATFORM
Greyfox AI is a new SaaS marketing automation app for SMBs. It provides hyper-personalization capabilities with the help of which merchants can target their customers with the right offer on the right product at right time using the different channels. The platform offers a 30 day free trial.
MY ROLE
As the sole designer on the team, I collaborated with key stakeholders to research, ideate, experiment, and successfully launch designs across features with an updated user interface.
CHALLENGE 1
Increase trial-sign ups
IDENTIFYING THE PROBLEM
While a new marketing campaign was bringing unique visitors to the landing page, trial sign-ups were low. The goal was not only to help users set up Greyfox but to also help them see value in the tool. We wanted to help people who were intrigued by the platform quickly understand its core offerings and encourage discovery as the tool was constantly evolving.
I began by understanding who their audience is, what they wanted, and where they were dropping off. This involved touching base with the internal teams that interacted with the customers and interviews to hear directly from their users. These were conducted remotely and then synthesized to arrive at key observations, data points, and insights.
Internal Teams
Customer service and sales
What are some recurring questions current and potential customers have?
Sales and Marketing
What are the main objectives of the platform? What is communicated to potential customers?
Analytics
What are the quantitative insights we have as to how people are using the product? What’s working already?
Users
Exit-Intent Surveys
A quick ‘why did you cancel your trial?’ with multiple choice answers.
User interviews*
How did you hear about the product? Have you used other marketing software before? What has been your experience getting started with Greyfox so far?
*These were conducted with mostly free, self-serve users, and people who were brand new to the product who signed up in the prior two weeks or so.
Research Insights
Unclear value proposition
Most page visitors did not sign up or cancelled their trial in the first 48 hours as they were spending too much time learning the tool and couldn't see the product value.
Target Audience
Greyfox has 12% enterprise accounts but 88% of them were small e-commerce merchants with 10-100 customers who came to the platform with short-term goals.
Low discoverability
About 72% of their users were using only 2 features (emails and campaigns). Customer queries seeking support on existing features were frequent.
I also put together a journey map to better define the user's pain points across the product experience and suggest opportunities for intervention.
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IDEATION AND TESTING
With the overarching goal of making Greyfox's onboarding flexible and functional while also helping reduce marketing and customer support costs, we conducted 3 core experiments over 4 weeks.
Since the primary reason for trial cancellations was lack of product clarity, we proposed that could increase conversions by providing personalized low-touch onboarding with a series of interactive walkthroughs and checklists. Our team concluded that we'd collect details on the business type, their goals, and the number of customers to create custom checklists.
Design Hypothesis for the experiments
Research - Onboarding references
VISUAL LANGUAGE
The inconsistency in the UI and lack of visual hierarchy led to low learnability and frequent errors. Data collected was getting lost without any visual anchors and adding to the user's cognitive load. I helped design a new language with an updated design library for desktop screens. The high fidelity screens and interactions were prototyped within Figma. I worked with the in-house copy editor for the messaging.
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UPDATED ONBOARDING
ONBOARDING IMPACT
Not only did the onboarding assist us in increasing our sign-up rate by 32% and decreasing customer inquiries, but it also improved the experience for existing users. With the checklist being permanently incorporated onto the homepage, we now had a space to promote new features seamlessly. By asking for multiple steps during the onboarding, we could reduce friction and keep the process simple.
CHALLENGE 2
Simplify campaign creation
IDENTIFYING THE PROBLEM
The campaign tab shows you a list of active and scheduled campaigns with an option to create one from scratch. Greyfox was unable to onboard enough new users to the feature. To better understand pain points, we conducted 10 usability tests over 6 hours, recording as they created campaigns with emails, offers, surveys, and AB tests. Similar to the onboarding research, I reached out to the in-house teams across marketing and business while also working with the analytics team to roll out SUS surveys that helped us understand what was working, and where they were struggling.
Internal Teams
Customer service and sales
Where do users troubleshoot? What are some common questions?
Sales and Marketing
What is the most popular feature on campaigns? What are their expectations?
Analytics
How much time do they spend on campaign creation? How many users returned? Can we look at heatmaps?
Users
Questions during the live workflow*
Why did you find *x* difficult?
Would you have liked more clarity?
Are you creating emails before or while you build the campaign?
Would you like reminders?
What platform do you usually do this on?
*These were conducted with existing users, users from marketing, and new users without prior experience.
Live workflow questions and notes. Format credit to Jaycee Day.
Research Insights
Missing Steps
No onboarding experience to introduce new users to the steps involved. People were unclear about how to get from point A to B resulting in frequent errors.
Low Discovery
Information and details on possible actions with each feature were missing. This led to most supporting features to campaign nodes being undiscovered.
Poor UX Copy
Apart from titles and keywords stating what the feature was, there was no explanation of what it could do for the user or how it needed to be used.
IDEATION AND TESTING
We developed the final campaign creation screens by iterating over the next 6 months. In addition to contextual walkthroughs, this involved -
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New node language with consistent sizing and color differentiation for easy differentiation (e.g. email vs time delay) to help users quickly scan through their campaigns.
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Drawers and forms that are consistent with competitor apps and sales automation tools on position, interaction, and related behavior.
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Updated campaign creation flow, allowing users to edit details at any point from the same screen instead of going back and forth.
Early variations and wireframes
UPDATED DESIGN WITH WALKTHROUGH
Modularity and Progressive Disclosure
By breaking up larger steps into small self-contained systems and exposing to features only where relevant the design reduced the cognitive load and allowed users to feel less overwhelmed.
Platform Redesign
In addition to the onboarding experience and the campaign creation flow, I redesigned the remaining screens with the updated set of features. Since the product was changing rapidly, they were mostly documented through Net Promoter Score (NPS) and Customer Engagement Score (CES) post-release to get a measure as to how well we were doing.
Overarching Information architecture
LEARNINGS
This project was my first experience working with SaaS products and designing for growth. Following were my personal learnings on this project.
Build a process
Prior to Skellam, I was used to designing a single large product or feature taking weeks to conceptualize, design, and implement. Here I learned to collect pain points from multiple stakeholders, prioritize problem areas in terms of effort and impact, and define smaller features to experiment with. It was also important to find a way to isolate the results for each design change and document the progress in a way that could be understood by everyone on the team. This process helped ensure that everyone was on the same page while helping our team quickly experiment and churn out ideas to iterate efficiently.
Know your user
While working on iterations, I was simultaneously learning how to read patterns of underlying motivations and subconscious biases users have. Paired with metrics, this was a humbling experience that changed my thinking from gut-based designing to user-centered solutions. Doing my due diligence and educating myself on common behavior patterns and terminologies has become lifelong learning that started from this project. Additionally, it was great to have a line of communication with the users. Collecting useful feedback through conversations is a skill that I'm learning to refine.
Get used to being wrong
As a designer, I had confidence in my assumptions and a false belief that a simplified redesign would automatically result in more engagement. Learning how to work with data has taught me that the user's decision-making is complex and iterating on received feedback is the only way to reach a good solution.
