Making Teams + Businesses Stronger Through Social Media + Gamification
Product Overview
Founded in 2009 by former Linkedin employees, PeopleLinx was a scalable cloud-based SaaS product that gamified best practices for Linkedin and other social business networks. The platform achieved this by helping employees optimize their profiles, build relevant networks, and engage their connections with targeted content. Their customers included Fortune 500 leaders in banking, insurance, legal, technology, and professional services.
Challenges
The PeopleLinx platform had gained positive forward momentum as an MVP, but needed to evolve if it was to remain competitive in a quickly expanding landscape — the codebase needed versioning, and the UI was clunky and unintuitive. Customers were ready for a more modern solution, and prospects required features that the MVP didn't (and couldn't) accommodate.
I was brought on board as PeopleLinx's Head of Design tasked with building an experience design department — collaborating closely with their newly expanded development team in a fully agile product environment — and re-envisioning the software as a more robust, user-friendly tool for customer's daily workload. It had to be powerful but intuitive and accessible to a broad audience of users.
Research + Feature Analysis
First step was taking a look at the current product, and deconstructing it down to its abreast essentials. Technically, it was a low-code build, but it suffered from two main issues:
1. It was built with an early version of the AngularJS web framework, and it desperately required an upgrade for optimization;
2. Because of the lack of versioning, the software was unable to support a wide range of useful features fully. The ones it did have functioned, but the experience was lackluster and at times unstable or unpredictable.
The product was not robust and extensible, and users were stuck with its limitations quickly.
Initially, PeopleLinx only integrated with LinkedIn's API, but soon customers wanted to optimize with other platforms synchronously — such as Twitter, Salesforce, Facebook, and Google+.
Customers also wanted a straightforward and frictionless way to broaden their connections with other individuals outside of their organization who might already be connected with internal colleagues. This way, the company as a whole would exponentially increase touch points throughout their networks and ultimately expand potential opportunities with prospects and like customers.
When I joined the team, the product was in need of some serious love.
Re-Defining Our Users
Now that we had some insight into our product and how it could improve, we needed to not only understand our existing customers better but determine who else we could target as potential PeopleLinx users. The opportunities that a more well-made product could produce were almost limitless. I reached out to a solid number of key clients — those we considered "Champions" or "Advocates" of the software — and set up several one-on-one personal feedback sessions to understand how they used the product and how it could improve. We collected positives and pain points, as well as must-haves through empathy mapping and user journeys. From this data, we created a few personas that mapped well to our diverse customer base and gave us a clear understanding of feature focus and the level of technology we would need to pull it off properly.
Collaborative whiteboarding sessions became part of our daily routine.
Low Fidelity Design Ideations
Satisfied with the amount of data we had collected, we began to sketch. We used the 6-8-5 rapid sketching exercise to produce designs for the timeline, sharing interactions, and optimization flows. Once I had a good base of sketches, we moved to wireframing.
I built low fidelity prototypes for the target features and scheduled user tests with people in our target market. We found a dozen team members from some of our existing customers to navigate the timeline, share some content, and optimize parts of their integrated networks. From these tests, we were able to quickly weed out some sticky points in each flow, such as:
The timeline content felt overwhelming at times;
Sharing content required too many clicks;
It wasn't clear if and when completed optimizations were performed.
Despite minor issues, each user told us that the UI was easy to navigate, and the purpose of the new platform was clear.
Further Feature Prioritization
We white boarded additional features interviewees had suggested, and founders highlighted at the kick-off meeting. We randomized the order and voted to use these features for the next prototype iteration, such as robust profiles, engagement statistics/metrics, and team leaderboards to promote internal competition. We created more prototypes that included these and gathered even more feedback from a new group of users. Feedback detailed that these features made a positive impact on the overall experience and kept users engaged and wanted to return.
Re-Branding
To coincide with the launch of the new version of the product, I wanted to re-invigorate our company with an original visual attitude which the product was already embracing. The feel of the new product was very different, but we made sure it wasn't such a radical change that it might alienate some users. The vibe of the product was unlike the older version, so a corporate make-over felt right. We landed on a new identity system, color palette, and typography/iconography that carried with it the vibrancy of the new product, and we received with open arms.
A New Product
The customer feedback loops provided me with a fantastic range of credible touchpoint, which we translated into viable product features that our upgraded web framework could run effortlessly.
The new product feature sets gave employees personalized guidance on how to optimize their social media profiles; integrated CRM data to maximize connections to customers and prospects; promoted sharing of company-approved content with their existing networks; and provided transparency on exactly how a company's social activity lined up against company KPIs around target accounts and relationships. The product's "gamified" environment seamlessly contained new metrics — measuring employee effectiveness on social and creating healthy competition internally that stimulated vibrant engagement.
The new product was now optimized for form factors below desktop, so employees could up their game on the go via mobile. The newly re-imagined timeline was highly dynamic, continually pushing up content and encouraging user engagement. Sharing articles was made more comfortable and visually compelling, but also offered users more significant tailoring and destination options. The previous version of the product did not promote statistics and metrics, but through our research, we found that customers craved context and effect to boost morale and drive engagement. The new platform brought critical data points to users at a click of a button. Connecting to people through the product was another heralded feature that received a fair amount of interest, and we made sure that flow provided precise delivery.
The new product not only made existing customers happy, increased retention and renewals, but it also grew our new client list by 20% in the first 6 months of its release.
Prologue
PeopleLinx was acquired by Frontline Selling in 2017, and they integrated the product we built into their existing sales solutions suite as their primary tool for social selling.