With the company wanting to move into multi location offices it was important that we had the ability to scale some of our key features easily for our users. Messaging being one of them.
I worked closely with the PM to conduct 2-3 user interviews a week. We started our first round of interviews by asking what our multi-office users needed most, what were they biggest pain points when handling offices and customers.
From there we were able to start our first round of static mocks to take to the next set of interviews.
Some user pain points:
- Messages getting lost over time
- Unable to assign messages to an employee or department
- See which messages came from missed call texts
- Keep drafts of messages
- Delete/archive message threads
- Know when someone else in the office has responded and who that employee was
- See when someone is already responding to prevent duplication of texts to customers
- Filter messages by department or tag
- Add/edit text templates for frequently used responses to customer
After each round of prototype interviews we would do quick iterations, sometimes even on the fly. This helped move the project quickly as we developed the right flow and interactions for our users.
Messages Default Home States
The actionable tab had any unread items as well as messages that hadn't been responded to within 3 days.
Tasks From the Home Page
From here users are able to see new incoming messages, applies filters to messages, manage drafts, and select bulk actions on multiple message threads,
Inside a Message Thread
From here users were able to see what messages were assigned to them, mark them completed, apply tags, archive, schedule a customer, and see how many employees have interacted with the message.
Creating a New Message
Message Templates
One thing that was commonly asked by our users was the ability to use message templates throughout the app. Specifically while working with Payments or Schedule Reminders. They needed the ability to keep a couple on hand for frequently used messages.
