Productive Call Assistant
Discovering new customer segments and helping users remember important information from phone calls
The challenge
How might we improve the call and task management experience to attract more paying customers?
Productive Call Assistant was created by Phoneic, an early stage startup in Silicon Valley. Phoneic’s mission is to empower productivity by making it easy to work while on the go. They envision creating an all-in-one workspace on the phone where important information from calls are stored and easily accessible. When we started working with Phoenic, they were exploring product market fit and looking for new customers. They were interested in gathering insights on how to improve their beta application experience, which included features for recording and transcription, voice notes and tasks, and CRM logging.
My role
I led a team with two other designers partnering closely with Phoneic’s CEO, Head of Product, and a UX strategy consultant on this project. Prior to starting, I worked with Phoneic’s CEO to prioritize key areas for our team to focus on. I led the user research and designed solutions for improving call and task management workflows. This case study is structured around the work I did on this project and showcases the designs I created.
User research
Identifying user pain points
In order to improve the on call and task management workflows, I wanted to identify pain points users were having. I asked our interview participants to perform the following tasks: call a contact, take a note, and find previous call information and discovered the following issues:
Discovering customer segments
One of the first questions we wanted to answer was who was the user of this application? The Phoenic team had reached out to sales people with mixed results and did not have a clear customer segment. Therefore, we decided to interview people in a wide range of professions with the criteria that their roles involved talking to lots of different people and needing to save and reference information from calls. Our goal was to identify common traits and behaviors of people who were interested in using this application.
We found traction with real estate agents as their role involved being on the go, having lots of phone conversations, and needing to remember specific information about each client. We learned that privacy was a deal-breaker for some professions like lawyers since they could not legally record phone conversations they had with clients. We recommended Phoneic target real estate agents and other independent contractors/ small business owners.
Empathize
To help me empathize with users and how they might interact with the application, I created a persona and storyboard:
Design process
For inspiration, I looked at applications that had note-taking, task creation, and audio transcription features. I sketched initial concepts and prototyped my solutions using the existing design system. After testing, I refined my solutions, explored new branding, and increased the visual fidelity.
Key features
Automated tasks and highlights
During testing users avoided voice notes, a critical feature that was intended to make note-taking easier. Users felt that recording notes on calls interfered with their ability to listen and was redundant since the call was being recorded and transcribed. I believe automated tasks and call highlights will be more useful as it simplifies the user workflow and makes note-taking optional.
Tasks-oriented home screen
The original home screen was not very usable. It contained call history in an inbox design, requiring users to go through each caller to see their tasks and notes.
I surfaced important information across all calls so users can easily see what their outstanding tasks are. I decided to show tasks (over notes) because they are the main followup after calls and users gravitated towards creating them.
Hierarchy and organized layout
Users struggled with finding and interpreting information from specific calls. The running log format had no clear hierarchy making it difficult for users to determine if they were reading notes at a contact or call level.
I created separate screens at a contact and call level and organized call information into clearly labeled sections for easy readability.
Resolving user pain points
Client feedback and impact
After several weeks of collaboration we presented a summary of our research findings and product improvement ideas. The Phoneic team was really happy with our work and did significant outreach to realtors. They also updated their website to advertise to realtors and business owners and released a version of the automated task creation.