With a diversity of customers from various industries with a multitude of unique business needs, it was imperative that we offered tools that could be tailored to our customers’ unique business needs and processes, whilst maintaining scalability of the product. Cost and efficiency of customer implementation and onboarding was also a massive bottleneck to company’s market expansion.
The objective was to provide a faster, and more standardized approach to implementation and onboarding, and provide customers with an interface enabling them to configure the product based on their own, unique business needs and processes.
Research and analysis played a huge role in this project. It was imperative to identify which configuration options provided the most value to our current and future customers. We began by engaging our sales, implementation, and customer success teams with questionnaires to begin understanding the types of data customers most-commonly needed customized, as well as factors that slowed their time to go-live. We also had a wealth of customer feedback from our product idea portal. Once we consolidated the research data and the customer feedback, we had a reliable knowledgebase of information to analyze.
Research and analysis clearly identified that most customers collected different information and had different workflows for the various features the product offered – customers collected different information when reporting workplace incidents, they had varying workflow states when conducting facility inspections, etc. The configuration experience and design had to hit the sweet spot that allowed the customer enough customization to meet their unique business needs and processes, without overwhelming them with configuration options and making implementation and onboarding too technically challenging. I began by conceptualizing a framework for records. Regardless of the feature, the architecture of a record would consist of the same building blocks that would maintain consistency and scalability. Within those building blocks would live the customer’s configurable data.
A simple and straight-forward interface was key to empowering customers to onboard themselves. I designed a solution that allowed users to access each feature’s configuration via the product settings. Through the feature configuration screens, a user could customize the feature category name, workflow, and forms and fields. When it came to form customization, it was important to maintain form design best practices whilst allowing the user to tailor their forms to meet their business needs. The answer was to take the onus off the user to decide which types of form controls were used and how the form was laid out, instead simply prompting them with a series of inputs that made those decisions. If a field contained selections then the system determined it was a list, the number of selections the list contained and whether it allowed single or multiple selections determined what type of list control it was, indicating if the field was mandatory applied mandatory input styling and validation to it, etc., etc. For customers requiring little-to-no customization, industry-specific templates were designed to provide a turnkey out-of-the-box solution.
Out-of-the-box configurations for category workflows were also provided, with the customer having the ability to add, remove, reorder, and rename workflow states and transitions through the configuration UI. The call-to-action buttons on a form reflected the configured workflow transitions for each workflow state.
To assist customers with configuration and self-onboarding, we implemented Pendo as a solution to provide on-screen help guides and walkthroughs. Guides were designed to be made available on demand, directing users through a screen’s various functions.
In addition to customizing category data, I extended the configuration design to allow customers to customize datatype formats based on their company’s standards. Datatypes such as date, time, currencies, etc. were configurable to keep data consistent and in line with the customers’ organizational standards. The configuration design and functionality were demoed to a large audience of customers at our annual VelocityEHS tradeshow and received rave reviews.