Zero to one product creation and launch.

Background
Research
Production
Outcome
Learning

Company
Upzelo

Duration
2 years

Role
Senior Product Designer

Skills
Interaction Design, Product Thinking, Research, Information Architecture, User Interviews

Tools
Figma, Miro

It's 5 times more expensive to acquire new customers than it is to keep existing ones. We set out to build a SaaS platform that would help companies retain their customers and grow their businesses.

We needed to create the product design strategy, run research projects, build the foundations of a new design system and identify opportunities for our roadmap.

User Interviews

We undertook 3 rounds of research interviews using People for Research and our personal networks.

• To establish the Market fit for our ideas (Jan 2021)

• To test our product, website concept and positioning (May 2021)

• To test our final product and collateral (Sept 2021)

Market fit

Once established our concept would best suit subscription or recurring payment models, we identified some businesses and services to shape our potential features around.

Competitor landscape

-Find out who our competitors are
-Learn about their products and services
-Find out their strengths and weaknesses
-Decide on a strategy to differentiate from the competition

Concept testing

We needed to test the concept's ability to appeal to potential customers. If potential customers did not understand its features and benefits, we would be hard-pressed to gain a customer base.

Product principles

Product principles help the team evaluate work across functions and up and down the decision-making chain, by ensuring that all work relates to the ultimate goal. Better alignment leads to better product decisions.

Brand

A visual brand language is an essential framework for product design that creates cohesion in the look and feel of a product. It allowed Upzelo to communicate its best qualities through an effective style, which could be used across many different types of media.

Connections

We were able to take a product that was already powerful and make it even more so by connecting it with external data.

This particular data is valuable to customers, who are looking for the most effective way of doing things. Because of this, we were able to hook into existing workflows and make sure that our customers were getting the most out of their time spent using our product.

Design System

Learning from my previous design system work, this was the opportunity to fix the things I wish I had done differently. Our Design System, called PAX, is built upon a base-styles document, which then supported the sub-library design systems. This meant I was able to globally change tokens with ease. I also decided to write the documentation using my components so that the developers could see and feel the visual style without having to ever see the product.

Build process

Prototypes, wireframe & testing

• Prototypes: Figma, Codepen, HTML, Local staging environment

• Wireframes: Miro, fFgma, pen & paper

• Testing: Hotjar, Google Optimize.

• Issues within onboarding & sales (defined as account setup, setup and product adoption) meant we struggled to secure customers to paid plans. The product needed much more advanced tech support from within the businesses than they had the capacity for.

• This led to the average lead time from trial to paying customer being 12 weeks.

• At times the size of our team meant we could not innovate and support the existing product effectively.

• At times, it would have been better to fail fast to learn fast to support growth and innovation.