Caroline Tallinger

A small UX improvement with big returns.

At the time I‌ started, I worked on one of the least-used features– our email-marketing tool, which was designed for our power users and shipped as an MVP. There was a lot of room for improvement…

Customer interviews are the foundation of Product Culture and Design Practices at Kajabi. It was standard was Product Designers to host no less than 9 customer interviews per project, small or large.

Unless we were doing a deep dive on a particular feature, I liked to keep our interviews open-ended, allowing our customers to talk about what mattered most to them…which helped us discover opportunities organically.

The Problem

During my open-ended interviews about our email marketing tool, we uncovered a common emotion that many of customers faced: anticipation and anxiety –about their deliverability rate.

A common practice for our Product Department was publishing our research to our teams in the Jobs-to-be-Done Format....

It doesn't matter whether you're a solo designer on your team, or the whole company-- the #1 issue you'll encounter is communicating (more accurately, defending) what your role does and how you do it. Finding a company that understands the role of UX within the team/project is rare, let alone finding one that has clearly defined goals for their new hire. Truthfully, the struggle begins before you even get hired. When scrolling through job descriptions for UX Designers, as one does, you'll encounter something like this:

1. Graphic designs skills a must!

2. Must know web development (HTML, Javascript, JQuery, C++, CSS)

3. Design email templates and marketing materials

4. Sketch ONLY

5. Design original graphics, images and illustrations

6. Must know Photoshop and Illustrator

7. Write copy for landing pages and email marketing

8. Head research projects and translate to actionable designs

... did you see the point? Because I didn't until I was three months...

Before I onboarded at Yobs Technologies, the company hadn't had a permanent designer on their team. They had cycled thru some freelance UX Designers contracted for a few months at a time, to build our MVP. Despite working in an ambiguous space with little data to test theories as a startup that was still pinning down their market fit, our engineers and I collaborated on creating a design system that would stand the test of time.

 

 

When I was finally onboard as the first full-time designer, the company also recently pivoted their business model, rendering the previous designs *almost* useless.

So, I had my work cut out for me.

Defining the Main User Goals

The first task I set out to accomplish was to understand if and how the previous designs accomplished their needs. I started off with a design tear-down/review of our SaaS platform. I evaluated the purpose of each component on every screen lengthy discussion...