Zach Cohen

Project Overview

Within the Integrate platform today there are many pages with poor performance. The main cause as to why these pages are slow to load can be tied back to the Lists feature, and the architecture of List data.

Lists are used to control and standardize incoming lead data, typically by excluding or targeting certain emails, companies or general criteria like country, state or job title. In the Lists page you can view a table of all the lists in your account and perform actions like creating or editing lists, and configuring list mapping.

In addition to causing performance issues across the application, there are many workflow issues with Lists that cause unnecessary and manual work for users. Improving this part of our application will save users large amounts of time, improve page load times, and keep moving our product in a world-class direction.

Challenge

Performance-based issues:

Roughly half of all page load times are currently slow because of Lists
A lack of bulk operations causes a lot of extra time for internal and external customers alike. When list changes need to occur across many sources, users today must manually make each change one at a time.
Sorting and organizing lists are not possible today, causing a messy environment in a vital place of our platform.
Lists touch many parts of the application today, creating an architecture that will become slower and slower as time moves on.

UX-based issues:

Bulk operation: Applying lists to sources is a monotonous task that requires the user to add them one by one.
Deleting, archiving, and organizing lists: Once the “Lists” page loads, there are other issues that cause workflow pains.
Maintenance of frequently used lists: Suppression Lists are commonly used and maintained within Eloqua and Marketo.
Uploading large lists: There is no easy way for users to upload very large lists into our platform today.

Role and Team

I served as the sole designer and researcher, working with a team of one product manager and 5 software engineers. I conducted all usability tests, as well as developed all design artifacts including flows, wireframes, and prototypes.

Approach and Process

The team separated the parts of the Lists feature screen by screen. We approached the project this way (Create lists, source associations, values, and mappers) also to allow engineering to make database decisions based on the proposed UI. After identifying the business goals for the improvements, the PM and I spent a lot of time together with a whiteboard sketching out ideas for our approach to improve the Lists feature.

During this time, we also put together a proper task flow which had not been done prior to our involvement in the project. This diagram shows the different paths a user can take from the Lists page along with the different types of data needed to be displayed at each point.

At the beginning of the wireframe stage, we decided to try paper prototyping to learn if our updated design ideas were on the right track. We printed out the new screen mockups and had internal users try to walk through how they would use the feature. We did this because we wanted to eliminate as much bias as possible about digital presentation and focus on the proper workflow first.

We went through dozens of iterations for the revamp of the Lists pages including areas where new UI to existing workflows were being established. Different tables, modals, drawers, testing each interaction with users to get feedback and see where our strengths and weaknesses were.

We eventually reached a point of diminishing returns with larger changes, and got close enough to where we needed to be to make large improvements in both performance and design.

Impact and Opportunities

Though we did not get to complete and ship the Lists feature changes in their entirety by the time I left the company, we documented our journey and decided on the following metrics to track:

Average page load time across the whole application
- Anticipated improvement of 25-33%
- The average page load time when opening a source decreased from 7+ seconds to ~1-2 seconds.
Time saved for CS and customers. The bulk operations that the new Lists UI will have will save CS time when having to make many changes to sources at once.

Reflection

Establish a partnership with Engineering way before designs are done. In fact, include them in conceptual meetings as well. Along with the PM, they proved to be invaluable due to the technical and data-heavy nature of the improvements we were trying to make.
Having meetings with a regular cadence with groups that this feature affected most was helpful in eliminating possibilities of last-minute changes to the designs after agreement.
Sometimes it's better to do what's most simple instead of trying to be incredibly innovative. There's a time and place for designs to push limits but other times doing what may seem obvious is the best approach.

← Return to Selected Work

→ Next Project