Revamping the user interface to make the learning curve for sales managers more tolerable

Ricochet360's clients loved the software once they got how to use it. The problem was that it took a while to get how to use it. It took about a month for the Ricochet360 team to help clients set up the application, customize it and train an admin to use it.

When users struggle so much at learning, they are likely to churn early. The best way to shorten the learning curve was to make the design more intuitive. For that, Ricochet360 needed experienced designers who could get it right. And that's why they came to Eleken.

For successful product redesign, we first had to understand the cause of a shallow learning curve. That’s why we started with the product analysis.

Product analysis is about taking a scrupulous look at the design and asking questions aimed at detecting design frictions.

We had two months for the Ricochet360 redesign project, and it would take another couple of months for developers to implement the new design. Considering the project duration, we offered our client to implement small improvements to the existing design first. They would take minimum effort yet make a positive impact immediately.

For example, let’s take a look at the “Add a new lead” screen, where we found the issue with the undefined phone number format along with some other minor inconveniences that resulted in poor user experience. Here are some small improvements we made for this screen that immediately made the change for good:

Based on the current interface, we got a mockup that took us two hours to design and another couple of hours for a developer to put everything in place. 

The business performance improved instantly, without waiting for a months-long redesign project to reach the end.

After analyzing the product and detecting frictions, our designers had to restructure the existing user flows by disassembling old screens on their core elements, like a Lego model. 

Restructuring is a method used for redesigns to figure out what path is taken by a user to complete a task, and what elements should be on each screen to help the user cope with their task. By making user tasks easier to complete, we would manage to shorten the learning curve.

Let’s come back to the Add a new lead page. Restructuring helped our team to formulate the following hypotheses:

When designers have all screen elements in a row, it’s high time to put them back together, following best UI practices. For Ricochet360, we did no wireframes. Having a visual concept already approved, our designers were able to create final mock-ups immediately. In contradictory situations, they’ve made two or three mock-up options for a client to choose from.

Here’s the final look of our screen for adding a new lead.  Just compare with the original from the above.

On this page, users can see the list of their leads. In the previous version of the interface, they could also see rows of buttons, all in different colors, that gave users no confidence in their choice.

The Add a new lead button, which is supposed to be the key button here, was barely visible. The brightest red buttons on the page were the Delete buttons.

It's unlikely that users open a lead management page to delete all the leads. But it's something that the old interface wanted them to do.

We offered our client to restructure the menu. As a result, it became twice as short as the old version, with easy linking between related settings and consistent naming.

The redesigned screen has the Add a new lead button as the main pole of attraction. The Delete buttons are safely hidden, as well as some other excessive elements.

Sales agents see the on-call screen when talking to prospects, and the users' experience here is clearly affected by information overload. The old screen has so many elements and buttons, and the names of the buttons are vague. What does the Close button do, does it end a call or close the page?

And look at that big red Delete button, placed right between the buttons called to save and end the call. What can be more annoying than deleting a lead accidentally instead of hanging up? Only regular accidental deletions.

It's unlikely that users open a lead management page to delete all the leads. But it's something that the old interface wanted them to do.

We were working on pages of the configuration menu when we noticed some oddity with the menu itself.

For our Add a new lead page, restructuring helped to formulate the following additional hypotheses:

It turned out that some closely related pages, like Transfer settings and Transfer groups, lived on the opposite sides of the menu and never met.

It also appeared that some names of menu items didn’t match the names of corresponding pages.

The number of menu items could be easily halved if we merge some of them together. For instance, the Company info page sits perfectly fine inside the Company settings page.