One of the main goals of the Akkroo product is to replace traditional lead capture methods (paper forms and badge scanners) used by sales representatives at trade shows. Despite this, Akkroo is typically sold to marketing departments for its powerful integration and monitoring capabilities — not sales teams, the ones attending the trade shows.
Because of this, by 2017, most of the improvements being worked on were aimed at providing value to the people monitoring what happened at these events, not the ones attending — but there’s nothing to monitor if you can’t convince your sales team to use the app…
That was Akkroo’s biggest problem at the time: the app experience had been mostly relegated to the background and sales teams were failing to adopt it due to stability issues and lack of basic features like the ability to review and edit lead data.
We framed this project around the user persona of the Sales Representative — who we named Serena Sales —, the typical user of the Akkroo app.
Using the Jobs to Be Done framework, we arrived at the following goal:
As Serena Sales, I want to be able to review and edit information collected in order to correct and append information to my leads.
We started by attending trade shows and observing people using both our app and traditional lead capture methods. This gave us a better understanding of the context in which the app is used — stressful, loud events which afford little time for meaningful conversations and even less time for data capture.
In addition to that, we learnt that most of our users only have sporadic need for an event lead capture app — they usually attend an average of four to six big trade shows per year —, which meant that we couldn’t expect our users to have much familiarity with the app any time they picked it up.
The first step in our ideation process was studying the existing user flow and exploring options for what the new one could be like.
This new section of the app would, in effect, be a place where our users could check and review all data pertaining to the event they're currently attending. This included a complete list of leads collected and the ability to see and edit their details — something that was not possible until now.
The busy context of the trade shows meant that we had to make sure the app was simple to understand, helping users create an accurate mental map as soon as they started using it.
To make sure the users would always know where in the app they were, we used methods like colour coding the different sections. Since this update would introduce a brand new section to the app, it would be essential for our users to never feel lost and be able to know where they were just by glancing at the screen.
Speaking to customers, we learnt that the syncing system was not as clear as they hoped, causing them a lot of anxiety in fearing that the data they collected was not being synced back to the Dashboard.
With this in mind, we designed a system to communicate the syncing status of any lead or event through the use of a status dot that would turn green whenever an item was synced with the cloud.
Finally, we discovered that most users had never even heard of Akkroo before they were told to install the app, so we added a little bonus to this redesign: a set of friendly onboarding screens — starring Akkroo’s mascot, Kangakkroo — to help educate the users about the benefits of using the app compared to more traditional solutions.
Test the onboarding screens on this prototype.
The major update was very well received, and it was the beginning of a major shift in focus at the company — our app users would prove invaluable in helping spread the word about how tech could finally be leveraged at events.
Value added:
Room for improvement:
With this project wrapped up, we quickly picked up what we learnt and started working on a brand new codebase with the React Native Akkroo App.