B2B SaaS
Product Design, UX Design
Affinity Mapping, User Interviews, User Journeys, User Flows, UI Designs
Users on our platform were struggling with a core workflow. Client emails that were important part of their engagement strategy needed to be logged on to our platform manually.
As a Lead Product Designer, I was tasked with solving this frustrating workflow gap - users juggling two disconnected systems - Microsoft Outlook for email communication and our product for logging the same emails. This created inefficiencies, caused critical data loss and impacted collaboration across teams.
I get 20 emails a day from different clients. Logging them all into the dashboard feels like doing the same task twice.
We discovered several pain points through stakeholder interviews and diary studies. Users were manually logging each email interaction into our product, often hours or days after receiving the original message.
Secondly, there was no way to know if a teammate had already logged a particular interaction, leading to duplicate entries. This was counterintuitive as collaboration was one of our key value proposal. Critical engagement context often got missed or buried because it wasn't recorded in time.
Sometimes I find out a colleague already replied to a client but that email wasn’t logged. I log this email in to your product and later my colleague logs the same email again. This has messed up our reporting and feels counterintuitive.”
I categorise emails on Outlook and at the end of the month log them into your dashboard.
This wasn’t just a user inconvenience but an operational risk.
With the insights from the user interviews and affinity diagram workshop, I mapped the current engagement logging journey, their pain points and possible solutions we could offer.
Logging should happen at the moment of reading, not as an afterthought.
goal 1
Integrate engagement tracking directly within Outlook.
goal 2
Reduce the time taken to log an interaction.
goal 3
Eliminate duplication.
goal 4
Make it easier to collaborate on issue history and client context.
Collaborating closely with engineering and business, I facilitated workshops and built out a prioritisation grid. It was critical to prioritise features that would be feasible to build and viable for the business to sell. We used an effort–impact matrix to focus on high-value quick wins as MVP.
Feature 1
"Log to ET" button inside Outlook
Feature 2
Pre-filled interaction metadata (entity, date, interaction type)
Feature 3
Duplicate detection for logged emails
Feature 4
AI-generated summaries of email threads
Designing the on-boarding process for the add-in
Before the users could use the add-in, I created some comprehensive on-boarding screens to guide on the feature functions. To match the user's account with their right ET account, I also created a flow for them to add their organisation's ET URL (inspired by Slack's login process).
Intuitive process to log an email using the add-in
Once the add-in was successfully installed, users could use to log the desired email. Based on our user interviews, we decided to populate primary information like date of interaction, method(email), and meeting notes. Auto-populating meeting notes was highly requested by the users.
We did face feasibility challenges while developing the add-in for due to which there were some fields that user would have to manually add i.e. company name, team members details who have already logged the email etc.
While we have iterative approach in building the product, we are working on improving usability by collecting regular feedback from our active users.
Tracking logged emails as drafts in the dashboard
One of the behaviour that we observed while researching our user's current workflow was that an impactful engagement (email in our case) was not clearly defined by the organisation. This often was a cause for confusion. This also meant that users were skeptical about which email was to be logged/recorded.
To tackle this, we created a workflow allowing users could log emails in Outlook and create draft interactions versions in our dashboard. Users would then return to fill in pending details and collaborate with their peers (usually senior managers) for approval.
Although we successfully conducted UAT, we were challenged by our clients security and compliance departments. One important detail that was missed during our scoping phase – some of our clients used onsite Microsoft Office to protect confidential data instead of the cloud infrastructure. This meant they couldn't access our Microsoft Marketplace plugin that was needed to use this feature. We are still working with the teams to manage this issue.
Increase in user engagement
We tracked the user engagement KPI for 2 quarters after the release and saw an increase in logged emails.
Increase in MQLs
Identifying pain-points, developing the add-in and listing it on Microsoft marketplace helped gain a competitive edge with an increase in marketing-qualified leads.
Reduce time to task
Time taken to log an email to the platform using the integration compared to the older workflow.
