AtChative — The Messaging Platform

Design System

I started by looking for reference of the design system. Since AtChative was a new brand, a style guide with design system is an essential tool for establishing brand identity. It helps communicate a consistent message to the users and ensures a smooth development process which can save so much time and effort.

After looking at some design systems, I had an idea of what are the necessary components to work on. A design system must have at least the following items: Colors, Typography, Buttons, Dropdowns, Inputs, Selectors, Progress and Alerts.

Competitors Research

To understand what enterprises use a messaging platform for, I did some research on the existing Chatbot providers such as Intercom, Crisp, Drift and Quriobot etc.

Drift is an emerging messaging platform, so I decided to dig deeper and see if there were any pain points of it. I found some reviews from Drift users, the following items have the most frequent complaints:

Pain point #1 Complicated interface
Some users found Drift’s interface complicated and said that it takes too much time to figure out how it works.

Pain point #2 Tricky pricing
Some users claimed that Drift is expensive. Their pricing is tricky and they couldn't cancel easily.

Based on these pain points and after several rounds of discussions with the product manager, we decided to make a messaging platform that is affordable, provides simple and easy to use functions for the businesses.

User Focus Group

We conducted a user focus group to test the low-fidelity prototypes of three products. It was run in the office while our colleagues were acting as customers and enterprises. After the activity, we used Trello to prioritize tasks and categorize them into groups.

Guerrilla Testing

We also did some guerrilla testing on the Customer Support Platform and mainly focused on feature discoverability. Guerrilla testing is a fast method that provides sufficient insights to make design decisions, it allows us to observe users and their interaction with the product.

Key Findings

Important findings from the user focus group and guerrilla testing:
• Users found it difficult to route a ticket to another agent
• The profile column is distracting when putting at the middle
• Users wished to filter the search result
• It’s impossible to look for more details of a customer

Wireframe

I was able to make an iteration of the wireframe of Customer Support Platform based on users’ feedback and the key findings.

Final Design

Learning

It was my first time working on dashboard design. The hardest part was most of the competitors don’t let users test their products unless we paid for it. Without access to the actual products, our team could only take reference from user reviews during the competitors research.

The second most challenging part was difficult to recruit participants. Two of our products were designed for enterprises, we could only reach out to three potential users during the guerrilla testing even it was run in a business event. One thing I learned from the testing was to make sure the user tasks are clear and concise. We should omit unnecessary words and be specific since we want the users to relate to the tasks easily.

The products definitely needed more usability testings, data analysis and iteration after the first launch. I no longer work in that company who owns AtChative, but I truly hope for the continued success of it.