BLITZEN

Saas tools are something that should save you time. For Blitzen’s users it’s about more than saving time, it’s about building relationships. 

This is the story of my MDEI industry capstone project working with a startup called Blitzen - an automation tool for people in sales and marketing in the B2B space.

MY ROLE

This project took place over the spring term of 2015. I led UX research in an effort to gain insight into customer pain-points related to their sales pipeline and working experience. I was responsible for planning, execution and production of all major research deliverables.

I worked alongside a small team of my classmates and our project sponsor, Josh Garofalo. Due to the fluid nature of the project I also assisted in other areas including business exploration, user onboarding, brand exploration/ strategy and final presentation of deliverables to the client.

THE CHALLENGE

CHOOSE YOUR OWN ADVENTURE

Our client provided us with three initial objectives - to complete a thorough analysis of their competitors; to optimize their existing user onboarding strategy; and to investigate pain points in the sales pipeline.

Over time our objectives would evolve to include user onboarding, more extensive user research and a brand strategy exploration. These reflected our own personal  insights and areas of interest.

With a tight timeline we decided to focus on helping users realize the time savings possible with Blitzen. We wanted to make sure Blitzen was reflecting their needs and doing so in a fun way through great design.  

THE APPROACH

FOCUSING ON THE BENEFITS

Our complete lack of knowledge surrounding the B2B SaaS space meant we needed to understand the nature of Blitzen’s industry and what they did thoroughly and quickly. This meant operating in a fluid state as a team and approaching all aspects of the project collaboratively.

Throughout the project we conducted ethnographic research and utilized user-centred design methods. This approach was necessary to understand all areas of the projects, particularly the sales pipeline and the pain points of the people using it.

To access prospective users, we conducted one-on-one interviews with participants we recruited through our personal and professional networks. This allowed us to build empathy with the user as well as quickly understand the day-to-day challenges of someone working in this space. Because of the difficulty in recruiting interview participants, we developed a survey to understand more broadly people’s tool usage, comfort with technology and pain points.

LANGUAGE AND UNDERSTANDING

Blitzen is an iPaaS which automates sales and marketing SaaS tools for SDRs and BDRs, specifically for SMBs in the B2B space, to fix all of your CRM’s data entry needs. Simple right? We quickly learned that language was really important. We sought out Blitzens competitors, blogs and online communities to immerse ourselves in, all while learning how to use Bitzen.

CONNECTING WITH USER IDEAS

User pain points. Were they what we thought they were? I developed a tiered research strategy that consisted of interviews, surveys, affinity diagramming, persona development and finally a workflow. By conducting this extensive research we were able to draw some key insights into the processes of people in sales and marketing and how Blitzen can better offer them value.

CONNECTING WITH THE PRODUCT

We felt we could better help users connect with Blitzen’s product in a meaningful way by improving the user onboarding experience. We would accomplish this by assessing their existing onboarding strategy and improving it while also providing a prototype for a future integrated onboarding experience.

CONNECTING USERS WITH BENEFITS

Blitzen’s customers aren’t purchasing a workflow automation tool. They’re buying a human centred, relationship focused solution, that saves them time and allows them to better connect with their customers. With this brand ideology in mind we prototyped a new landing page for the brand that embraces the visual metaphor of connection, with simple copy that’s conversational and targeted while containing recognizable imagery focused on the benefits.

THE DISCOVERY

TIME = CONNECTIONS

The discovery phase was a quick, high‐intensity effort that allowed us to define project milestones, audit the existing work, review the competitor landscape, understand our client's vision, and begin research into user needs, behaviours and pain‐points.

Our user researcher revealed that the working styles, personalities and sales stacks of users was more diverse than expected. Diversity was a crucial insight that would later inform persona archetypes. The major theme underlying pain points? Wasted time, time Blitzen can give back to users.

After collecting data from users interviews and from an online survey I conducted an affinity diagramming session to categorize behaviours. We then designated three persona types and underwent a collaborative and iterative approach to developing representative personas informed by earlier behavioural affinity groupings.

We knew personas would be a valuable asset to the Blitzen team that would enable empathy for the user in a startup environment where the user can otherwise be forgotten.

Our persona’s consisted of three different archetypes which we used to facilitate discussions about our users needs, desires and varying contexts of use. Through careful analysis of our research and feedback, we identified behavioural variables to segment our user base. These variables could be categorised into activities such as working style, skills such as tech savviness and motivations such as reasons for working in sales. We discussed the personas with our client to ensure they were not only valuable, but also representative of user segments they had separately identified.

USER EMPATHY

We were under a tight timeline which meant we needed to be efficient in our user research and data collection. Participant recruitment was challenging but we were able to conduct a range of interviews with inbound marketers, SDR’s, BDR’s, account executives, and VP’s in B2B sales. After scouring online sales communities across Twitter, Quora and LinkedIn to understand users motivations we were able to distribute a survey through these very same channels. These varied research techniques helped to build user empathy and gain insight into the needs of our users and gave us a concrete understanding of the B2B sales environment and user workflows.

THE VISION

IF IT CAN'T BE PERFECT, AT LEAST IT CAN BE FUN

Blitzen's competitors were way ahead in the integration game so we weren’t going to encourage playing catch up. Instead, inspired by Don Norman, our vision was to provide users with a more playful, and usable Blitzen experience, focusing on the human benefits of form automation and app integration. Those benefits? More time with the people that matter.

THE REQUIREMENTS

A LITTLE BIT NOW, A LOT FOR LATER

We had endless ideas for how Blitzen should look, feel and function but there was one thing we had to keep reminding ourselves of; Blitzen was still in beta and the things we wanted to change now might not even be relevant to the next version the developers were working on. So, we would focus on providing a few immediate improvements outside of the app while also developing some long-term guiding principles:

• an improved email onboarding strategy
• recommendations on a documentation/ ticketing system to adopt for email onboarding management that would be used to affect a purchasing decision
• an assessment of existing onboarding
• an optimized version of existing email onboarding
• a breakdown and mockups of what an optimal in-app onboarding strategy would look like
• a brand exploration
• a branding strategy including landing page mockup for visual reference

BRAND AND EXPERIENCE

Understanding the value Blitzen offers and its usage contexts with users allowed us to develop a consistent and fun branding ideology. Theodore Levitt said, “People don’t want to buy a quarter-inch drill. They want a quarter-inch hole!” This thought informed the development of our brand ideology alongside the insight that Blitzen was really a relationship building tool not just an automation tool.

This brand ideology embraced the visual metaphor of connection, with simple copy that is conversational and targeted at sales hackers while containing recognizable imagery focused on the benefits of the product.

DETAILED DESIGN

INTRODUCING A LANDING PAGE MOCKUP

The images below represent Blitzen’s new branding ideology as applied to a landing page mockup. 

GETS SIGN UPS

At the end of the day a good landing page should produce good leads and great conversion rates. We used a classic, vintage design aesthetic on this landing page to convey the dependability and trustworthiness of Blitzen. 

The page utilizes the visual metaphor of connection to represent apps being integrated and connected with Blitzen. The copy is focused and directed on the community of sales hackers and full-stack marketers, just the kind of people that would want to use Blitzen.

BUILDS AND REINFORCES A STRONG BRAND IDENTITY

We envisioned a fun and engaging brand identity utilizing historic and fictional imagery that’s familiar, cheeky and lighthearted to communicate this vision. The powerful image of a rolodex, the number one tool of the salesperson of yesteryear, is used to indicate the value Blitzen can offer.

EDUCATES AND INFORMS

The copy focuses on the benefits while balancing a light conversational and fun use of language. Again, imagery is used to let users know that they can trust Blitzen because other people do. The a call to action is repeated again to remind the user what they should be doing.

THE IMPACT

A BANDAID, SOME INSIGHTS AND A ROAD MAP

Our industry capstone project with Blitzen represented the culmination of everything we had learned throughout our masters program. We integrated ideas from the people we knew, our teams multi-disciplinary background, our various courses and everything we learned over the course of the term from Blitzen. The project acted as an excellent introduction to startup culture and was open, collaborative and iterative from day one. This allowed us to integrate our own unique skill sets in meaningful ways that would have a tangible impact on the company.

The more we learned the more the project changed.