TRIAL EXPERIENCE DESIGN
The project (Trial Experience) is an interactive web demo experience hosted under Coherent website, which is aimed to highlight the features from the core platform in order to drive customer engagement and lead the sales.
VISIONS
The team used to mostly talk about how great our technology is, but it may not be clear what our product does. It can be complicated for customers to learn about the product features. So the team saw an opportunity to drive awareness and interest from customers by showcasing how our products can solve their business problems, using simple interactive demos. The project goals are clear:
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Drive more leads for business expansion, targeting businesses from the insurance and finance industry
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Optimize the sales cycle
"Your first 10 words are more important than the next 10,000"
- Elmer Wheeler
Our approach is to simplify the message and communicate the value propositions, by highlighting the value how core platform adds to existing problems in Insurance and Financial Services. The audiences of the trial experience must be able to understand how the product will help them.
The project team was a micro team with 4 core members: a Project manager, a Tech Lead and 2 Senior UX Designer.
There was cross-department collaboration among the Sales Engineering, Marketing, Customer Success and Actuarial teams, involving a bunch of stakeholders interviews, user research, usability testing, and comments sessions. The detailed process will be explained below.
RESEARCH AND DISCOVERY
FEEDBACKS OF PREVIOUS PROCESS
We arranged interviews with both internal and external parties to get more insights into the previous sales experience. We invited the Sales Engineer and Customer Success team to share their existing sales process and we discovered that they used to directly demonstrate the product features through the core platform, with additional information from Powerpoint decks.
The major feedback from both parties also indicated these concerns:
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The product is so complicated and not clear what it does
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The user journey of features is not intuitive enough to be fully self-serve without guidance.
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It is not easy to reformat the Excel file to make it ready for uploading to the core platform
COMPETITOR ANALYSIS
We reviewed competitor websites and their sales materials to gather insights. We found that highlighting the "Before & After" is a common approach that effectively showcase the benefits of the product. A step-by-step interactive demo is also crucial to let the audience understand and engage with the product.
DESIGN PROCESS
BEGIN WITH OUTLING THE IDEAS
STORYTELLING FOR CASE STUDIES
In the first phase, we designed two lively case studies as our personas to describe the stories. One is a budget forecasting use case in the financial industry, showcasing how fast the user can generate and execute test cases using our product. The other use case is for the insurance industry and demonstrates how efficiently the user can generate and update a Pet insurance quotation tool (which is also a demo case for the Explainer product).
DESIGN, TEST AND IMPROVE
During the whole design process, we also collaborated with teams to validate and iterate on every new design idea. The Sales Engineering team introduced how they usually demo to the client in a sales pitch which gave us the idea to create the interactive user guides, they also provided a suitable Excel model as an example for the calculation part. The Actuarial team suggested valid test cases and calculations to enhance the persuasiveness of the demo.
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At each stage of the design iteration, we also did usability testing with internal stakeholders and external parties. We got lots of feedback and suggestions that helped us keep improving our designs.
TESTING GOALS AND METHODOLOGY
We launched 2 rounds of external testing on Usertesting.com and Wynter, with over 70 participants in total. We targeted users from the finance and insurance industries who are enterprise software users and senior professionals with strong Excel skills. The goals are to get insights into how the users understood the value proposition, the messages and copies, their sentiment with the interactive demo, how they felt about the visual design. We let the users do A/B Testing with a random sequence of the design options, to reduce their preception of preference.
We got lots of positive feedback, and over 30% of the testers were keen to understand more about our product after the test, which proved our approach is valid and able to bring positive impacts to our product.
At the same time, we also got suggestions to further iterate on the copies or contents to provide clarity on how the product comes into play during the journey.
FINAL TWEAKS
We further packaged the design with a professional touch. We got suggestions from the Marketing team on how our design can align with the positioning of the product and deliver the right and punchy message to the audience, and we also worked together to refine the use case personas with industry-specific content.
To highlight how our products fit into the journey, we also collaborated with contractors from an external design house to create visually appealing and professional animation videos for each use case.
