CRM settings
About the company: Pipedrive is a sales CRM for managing the sales process and helping your business to grow.
About the project
What:
Introduction of pipeline access restriction in the visibility group page. Restricting access to pipeline and with that restricting access to the deals within that pipeline(s)
Why:
- Number 1 request from the customers in Permissions & Visibility.
- Security - data security is at risk if users have more access than they should
- Users will be easily distracted if they have more access than they need, specifically unable to limit the pipelines' access.
How:
- Revamping visibility group page for better user experience.
- Adding pipeline restriction to visibility group settings.
Team
I worked with a team of 6 people, 2 from the product side, and that’s the product manager and me. We worked closely with 4 engineers, including 1 project lead who led the overall concept from a technical point of view. We involved other experts as well during the different phases of the project. UX writer for content-related topics, alignment designer for design system-related consultations, and analytics for bringing in more data and Insights.
Product designer :)
Product manager
Project lead/Back end developer
Front end developer
Back end developer
Front end developer
High-level Process board
At pipedrive, we have a pre-mission phase- where the designer, product manager, and tech lead collaborate and kickstart the discovery phase, where we empathize with the problem and validate with the customers. We also involve engineers, brief them about the progress so far, and cross-check if we need to include anything from the technical standpoint. Following a similar pattern, we move towards the definition and development stage, as shown in the process board below. Once we have all the validated solutions with us, we hand over the files to the engineers for final development, and this phase is called as mission phase.
Weekly rituals during the mission
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Retrospective-Bi-weekly
To understand what we can improve to ship things on time without compromising with the quality.
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Morning stand-up
Run mainly by the project lead and the main objective is to update the team about the progress and daily workload.
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Design review with design team
Every Tuesday, we show our designs during the design reviews with the design team.
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Design review with project team
After getting feedback from the designers on accessibility and scalability now, it’s time to get technical feedback from engineers.
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Weekly huddle
We gather together as a team, spend time on high-level problems, and make strategies for solving edge cases.
Data & Analysis
What we gather from the initial data that we requested from the analytics team and the recurring customer feedbacks?
The current visibility groups feature page is not intuitive, users are confused how to set up visibility rules and it lacks in providing enough granularity to respond to customer needs. Namely, roughly 20% of customer feedback in the area of Permissions & Visibility is around requesting the possibility to restrict pipeline access.
We started looking at the usage of pipelines by users on different plans and what kind of restrictions they are looking for?
Stakeholder interviews
What was my role:
Most of the things I did along with the product manager, but I handled many things single-handedly. From creating scripts to sending interview invites and leading the interviews with all the stakeholders.
Customer interviews
Conducted multiple rounds of interviews with the actual users and tried to understand the main pain po points.
Cross team interviews
Conducted a few interviews with the internal product teams to understand the feature dependency and how we can collaborate during the project.
Internal interviews
We conducted initial interviews with the support team to understand the depth of the problem and what workarounds people are using.
Concept approval
To get approval for the concept and show the regular improvements along with the OKRs.
User stories & flows
After validating our assumptions and data analysis from the discovery phase, I created all possible user stories. And then created the user flows with the help of the product manager and project lead.
We had many edge cases and not having the answers to the problems, but we got the solutions to mostly problems as we progressed with the project and brainstormed more as a team.
Exploration lab
To validate all the initial research work and ideate together for the possible solutions we decided to have a exploration of 1 day. We decided upon the Goal of the project and HMW statement, and created quick and dirty wireframes.
All the wireframes and decisions helped me a lot to move ahead and create more accurate wireframes and then move ahead to the UI phase.
Hi-fi Figma Ui & prototypes
Pipedrive’s Ui process is very streamlined and straightforward:
- Follow the design language system.
- Get the consultation from the alignment team whenever needed.
- Check the localisation guide.
- Innovate new ideas.
I created the new hierarchy tree structure in the project that was a little challenging but solved many user problems and made the overall Ui buttery smooth, and enhanced the UX to a next level. I got many ideas from the front end devs and tested out some of the lame designs as well but everything went through the design reviews from the experts.
Usability testing
Before handing over the final solutions to the developers, I prefer to check the clickable prototypes I created on Figma during the usability testing sessions.
I created the hypothesis and gave the scenarios to the users, and asked them the questions. We got many crucial feedbacks and did many iterations.
The project is finished, now what?
Time to start tracking user activities, and we put events on amplitude:
Number of users started to interact with the feature
Number of users creating new groups and sub-groups
How many users are easily navigating the hierarchy structure
What different methods and approach I tried during the project?
Quick wireframes during discovery interviews
It was beneficial to get the feedback on the ideas right from the beginning. I created quick and dirty wireframes to get feedback on the feature's entry point.
Involving engineers in the interviews
I asked engineers to get involved during the discovery interviews as it would help everyone to understand the pain problems and stay at the same page. It would help the team to avoid working in the silos
Weekly design reviews with project team
To get everyone updated about the progress from the product side, I decided to have design reviews with the whole project team instead of just the designers. All the engineers and copywriters found it so helpful that we are doing it in every project now.
