Q4 2018

New Check-in Experience in the Akkroo App

Context

The check-in functionality of the Akkroo product allows users to upload a list of leads and accounts they expect to meet at a trade show, empowering them to leverage information they may already have on important prospects and potentially making it easy to close the sale.

In the early stages of planning to deliver the React Native Akkroo App, we decided that the existing check-in experience was not up to the standard that we were hoping to offer with the new release, so we tackled it as a separate project after the launch of the new app.

The existing experience, having been added years prior to cater to a B2C use case, was neither intuitive nor fast and caused a lot of frustration to users on the show floor. Despite this, some of our B2C customers did find value in the ability to leverage pre-existing lead information, so we decided to revamp the functionality instead of scrapping it altogether.

Problem

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 access a list of attendees in the app in order to leverage existing information and measure attendance rate.

Discovery and ideation

Our main goal was to completely rethink the user flow for these types of events — it needed not just to work for any customers already using the functionality, but also to provide enough value to get others to give it a try in favour of the basic lead capture type event.

We also knew from the beginning of this project could potentially power the future of the Akkroo app. The user flow to lookup attendees could later be repurposed to allow users to tap into their CRM and MA databases — or potentially any other source.

Looking at the old user flow, we easily flagged the two forks (represented by a in the diagram below) as being the biggest issues: they caused frustration by splitting the flow into two distinct and conflicting experiences, and asked users to make decisions without providing the information required for them to act with confidence.

Focusing on those two spots, we revamped the user flow to provide an experience that is less confusing and more empowering. Here are some of the most significant changes we made:

Is the lead in the guestlist?

Our solution to fix this stress point was to remove the need for it completely. In its place, we designed an interface that can accommodate for capturing both new contacts and append information to existing ones.

By nudging the user towards the searching functionality, we can present them either an existing record of the lead they're looking for, or give them the option to create a new one that will prefill the name (or email address) with the search query, saving them time.

Is more info required?

Here, we reworked the interface to make sure we don't overload our users with unnecessary decisions during a busy and stressful event.

If the user needs to collect any information to perform a check-in, they'll be taken to the collection form so that they can do it easily.

If they do have all the required information, they can quickly check-in and move on to the next lead (or collect optional information they may have gathered).

After these changes were introduced, we ended up with a user flow that looked a lot simpler and was easier for our users to understand and navigate when at a stressful event:

Feedback sessions

Because this feature was completely new in the way that it mixed the ability to check attendees in, review existing information, and capture new information, we worked very closely with some of our customers and have improved this functionality over many iterations.

Through constant improvements and gradual optimisation of the experience, we were able to eventually arrive at a flow that was easy and fast to use without a steep learning curve for existing customers.

Outcome

Getting to rethink a traditional lead capture user flow from the ground up by adding multiple sources of information (starting with the list of attendees, but eventually extending to others), merging collection of data with data lookup seamlessly, and doing it in a way that is easy even for non-tech-savvy people to use was very challenging, but ultimately very gratifying.

In the end, we turned a feature that could have been deprecated into an experience that is aligned with our ultimate goal for the product. All that was achieved by working closely with our customers, gathering tonnes of feedback, and continuous iteration.

Value added:

• A better experience that is more aligned with the market that Akkroo is catering to.
• Future-proof user flow that can surface information from any kind of source.
• There was an increase in usage of check-in events.

Room for improvement:

• Integration of badge and business card scanning into check-in events wasn't achievable with the infrastructure we had at the time, but would come later on.