Desktop App
Messaging Inbox
This project is a communication tool that combines two separate interfaces, allowing the dealer users to perform daily tasks more efficiently and effectively. The redesign focuses on giving users the power to take action quickly, breathing life back into an interface that desperately needed attention.
Client /
myKaarma
Role /
Lead Product Designer
Team /
1 PM, 2 Designers, 4 Engineers, 1 Product Marketing Manager
Status /
V1 Released as of December 2021
OVERVIEW
Change aversion is well known to designers. Users tend to almost always have a negative reaction to change, whether it's functional changes or interface changes.
In this case, change was inevitable.
In 2021, myKaarma acquired a new company called PocketExpert. With this acquisition comes the task of combining interfaces and filling up functionality gaps. In addition, we had a backlog of user-reported issues we needed to address as well.
At the heart and soul of managing conversations, Inbox is a busy place where many hands need to work collaboratively to resolve customer issues. As an essential tool in many of our customers' work days, being able to work efficiently within it is something I actively think about and optimize for.
My goal was to help our customers feel in control.
RESEARCH AND EMPATHIZE
Interface - What and why are we doing anything…
Over the past 9 years, myKaarma has not made many updates to the interface, but has consistently added new features to satisfy the needs of our users and deal with evolving business issues. With the acquisition of PocketExpert, this method no longer worked.
Below, you can see the interface that I inherited from both myKaarma and PocketExpert.
Instantly, anyone can notice the vast difference in style and even features.
I wanted to take the opportunity to not only update our interface and fill in the feature gaps, but also solve some user issues that we have accumulated through our Uservoice and Intercom app.
How do we go about mending these two worlds while building an interface flexible enough to accommodate our new features?
Feature Comparison - What does PocketExpert have that myKaarma doesn't...
To start, I compiled a list of all the features that myKaarma and PocketExpert support. The gap features are denoted in yellow below.
It is good to note that just because a feature is built, it doesn’t mean it is useful. After compiling the list, it is time to narrow down what feature gap is useful to build and what is just clutter.
Features Gaps and Feature Requests - Now let's go back to our users...
To aid my decisions, I had to go back to our users.
Earlier I mentioned Uservoice. Uservoice is a platform that we use to let our customers add feature requests, which are then upvoted by other customers who have the same or similar issues. In order to vet the feature requests, I have to follow up with users to clarify the issues reported and look at data to further validate the claims.
In this redesign, I wanted to tackle some issues we had put off before. To get started, I used Uservoice to narrow down all the feedback to only messaging issues with at least 100 votes.
These were the top 3 feature requests that had something to do with PocketExpert feature gaps:
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Ability to create and save custom views
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Ability to favorite messages
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Ability to perform all actions from the messaging view (such as scheduling an appointment)
Apart from the PE feature gaps, I have also identified 3 more issues I would like to address in this project as well.
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No auto refreshing of the messaging table when a new message comes in. Users have to manually click a refresh button every time.
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No preview of the message body in the table
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Everybody has the same view and it is not useful information for some roles
User Personas - Who are we designing for...
First, I wanted to make sure I understood who uses the messaging table the most and why. I found that the top 3 users included: BDC Representative, Service Advisors, and Service Manager.
User Stories - Why and how are they using our app...
After identifying our main users, I went ahead and scheduled 1:1 interviews with users in those roles. I discovered that flows varied from dealer to dealer, but most have similar issues to solve. I went ahead and drafted a basic swimlane to illustrate the relationship between the three roles.
DESIGN AND DEVELOP
User Testing - Putting everything in picture form...
In an effort to measure the users' reaction to the interface changes, I wanted to test the changes in smaller portions to different user segments we have previously identified through our NPS surveys. I broke the interface up into two (Beta 1 & 2) and then gave a full version (Beta 3). My partner and I created three parallel betas to ship, test and tweak every single change both together and in isolation.
Here’s what the betas looked like:
Beta 1
In this version, the inbox view will be changed to a custom view. Everything on the left hand menu are views created by the customer themselves.
The way users communicate with their customers remain the same.
Beta 2
In this version, the filter menu on the left remains the same as the current design. The only thing that changes is the customer thread view.
This updated ui will give additional features such as the ability to schedule appointments and follow the thread.
Beta 3
In this version, I introduce a combination of the two betas above. I have preset some views on the menu to the left. Users can also add their own custom view.
In addition, I also added the updated customer thread view. The one drastic change is the removal of the inbox table.
During this user testing phase, we looked at a few things:
Discoverability
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Is everything on the interface easy to understand?
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Did we have to explain anything?
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Can our users still perform the same functions as before?
Speed
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How fast can someone send a text, send an email, or make a phone call?
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How quickly can the user perform the different tasks we assigned them?
I had a sample size of around 160 users (40 users per beta). Based on the results of our user testing mentioned above, I learned that Beta 3 had the best results.
Deliverables - What I ended up shipping...
A picture is worth a thousand words, so let’s just cut to the big reveal. This is two screenshots of our first milestone. It will be released to 10 dealerships to help further validate my design decisions. Due to privacy issues, I can not show all the features of our new interface.
