Scaling a Startup to New Heights
Stabilizing usability and growing product offering
As Lead Designer at Responsibid, I leveled up our product team’s design and research initiatives to ensure we delivered valuable software to users, whether improving the interfaces they used every day or solving additional pain points through new functionality.
Project Type
SaaS Web App
Role
Lead UX Designer
Team
2 Designers, Product Manager, Project Manager, 7 Developers
Duration
Jan 2024 - Present
Navigating a Major Transition
I was a fresh college graduate ecstatic to join ResponsiBid and make an impact through design. A new interface had just been built, and there was a lot of buzz going around the company due to the improvements the new codebase and new UI would provide. I was excited to see the impact of a new interface!
Then we launched it, and reality hit us. Hard.
I was dumbfounded. Users were flocking back to the old UI in herds. Was the new one really so bad? Didn’t they want the newer, shinier, version of their everyday workflows? Support was overloaded, and some users lost confidence and left ResponsiBid altogether. I wondered, what can we do to make this right?
Empathizing with Users
I led 20 user interviews, uncovering key pain points
Changing everything simultaneously presented a significant learning curve, even for seasoned users.
Many of the changes unintentionally presented new usability issues that hadn’t been there before.
What was meant to be a more modern and appealing interface felt like visual noise making it hard to focus.
Solving Pain Points
After gaining a better understanding of users’ frustrations with the new UI, my product manager and I agreed we needed to prioritize improvements before we could move forward with the product roadmap. I made a plan to iterate on several key task flows and seek additional feedback through usability tests until users were satisfied with experiences.
Improving the interface increased new UI users by 20% and growing
Focus on Iteration
Through this experience, I learned more clearly than ever the value of the design process. Design and product have to be iterative. Testing, testing, testing. User tests are essential to ensure usability and validate product value before ever exhausting development resources.
As the lead designer, I emphasized this focus in our design processes. We made a conscious effort to understand our users better through research as seen in various rounds of user testing.
We conducted 60+ user tests in a year (100% increase)
In addition to iteration, this experience taught me the value of the agile methodology. Just like design is iterative, agile teams are iterative. I helped determine with my team going forward that we would release small updates incrementally to avoid overwhelming our user base. For larger releases, we would release to small control groups first to refine overlooked usability issues.
Building a Design System
After resolving post-deployment challenges, I knew that more needed to be done to avoid issues going forward. To improve usability through consistency and intentionality, I began to build a design system. Collaborating with the other designer and developers, I leveraged the use of MUI components, atomic design methodology, and existing styles and practices.
This not only provided greater consistency but streamlined design workflows and reduced developer time by eliminating the need to rewrite code.
Creating Value through Expanded Functionality
Once we had begun improving our processes through research-verified solutions and greater consistency, it was time to add additional value to our users through highly requested functionalities and the architectures to support them.
From Sales Software to CRM
With as many challenges as the major deployment had, we now had an expanded infrastructure that could support turning a sales software into a comprehensive CRM (Customer Relation Management) software. We continued to build the interfaces, experiences, and logic needed to continue this trajectory.
Historically, ResponsiBid was a quoting calculator. The major deployment brought customer profiles that allowed multiple bids to be stored on profiles. My task was next to build jobs, which could be created from bids. I inherited a working design from a designer who had left the team after training me to replace her. I tested this design and made refinements to get to the final solution.
Payments are expected to increase sales by 20% and reduce churn by 25%
Integrating a payment processor through invoices was my next project. This is still ongoing. However, the collection of payments is a highly requested feature that will allow users to simplify multiple workflows and use ResponsiBid as a single software solution.
It is currently viewed as a "luxury" tool by some, so this will transform it into a business "necessity". It's expected that this will widen reach with and increase account sign-ups by 20% at first and then more as the software continues to grow. Additionally, 25% of accounts are lost due to the absence of this functionality, so adding it will compel businesses to stay.
Revisiting the Quoting Calculator
Our team realized while conversing with users during research that not everyone wanted to use ResponsiBid as a CRM. Most users already had a CRM, and many were happy with it. I wondered how we could provide additional value to the majority in the near future.
It became clear to me that in addition to becoming a CRM, we also needed to continue adding value to the software as a sales tool. As a result, we worked on the following quick wins:
Revamping the search interface when pulling up details for existing customers.
Adding an integration with Zillow to provide users and their customers with public data to help them fill out the intake form and get more accurate pricing for quotes.
Broadening Reach with New Pricing Models
Another way I helped expand functionality was in designing a limited version of the software for a new user type. This put the software in the hands of users we would never have been able to reach.
Sales and marketing are doing their part to help convert some of these smaller businesses to paid accounts, so that they can further take their businesses to the next level through automation.
The free version led to a 15% increase in total users
Handoff to Engineering
With all the initiatives I worked on to help provide greater value to customers, I can’t leave out how we improved our delivery process and documentation. I became the sole designer at the company after working for about 4 months, so I worked hard to understand what the developers needed to make their job easier.
I contributed the following:
Delivering detailed component states and design specs
Adding prototypes for clearer user interactions
Meeting one-on-one with the developers
This removed guesswork, helped promote better solutions through collaboration, and ensured results that matched the design vision.
Final Thoughts
It has been an incredible journey so far empahizing with users, iterating on multiple approaches, and seeing the benefit this provides to users and their businesses. I’m excited to continue driving impact through design.
