JAN 2016 · UX/UI Design

Portfolio management tool

The challenge

Redesign the current portfolio management tool in order to allow big sellers to operate big amounts of domains

Project overview

Undeveloped (now Dan.com) is a double sided domain name market place. It allows people to easily buy and sell domain names. For a long time the company was focused mostly on buyers, optimizing and smoothing their experience in order to get more sales. But at some point we noticed that amount of sales was almost always linear to the size of domain inventory on the platform.
It became clear that in order to grow the profits the company needed to care more about the sellers. Yet there was no automated process for that.
It was my first project of such size and complexity, it was scary and exciting.

Process

I started my investigation with support department. I asked them to list most popular requests and struggles our sellers and buyers had. Support managers also put me in contact with most active sellers. Me and my PM conducted bunch of interviews and created lots of artifacts such as empathy maps, user flows, customer journeys, personas and so on.
In between of interviews I conducted market analysis, in order to understand what other companies like ours offer to their customers. But what if the info we’ve got reflected struggles and needs of the most loud but small segment of our users? To validate that I rolled up my sleeves and dived into domain forums, reading dozens of threads, and trying to find patters and common struggles.

Insights

The biggest insight we received from our research was the fact that sellers with big portfolios manage all their domains and pricing in an exel doc, which was completely different from the assumptions we had in the company. Another insight was the fact that most of the sellers try out new platforms with small amounts of domains, so it also changed the scope of the task, the new management tool was meant for bulk actions and also for operations on a smaller scale.
I needed to make both experiences as simple and smooth as possible.

Validation

In order to understand how my solution was fitting the problem of our users and how technically viable it is, I was constantly consulting with engineers and our power users. Sketches on paper became wireframes, wireframes transformed into clickable prototypes. On the prototyping stage I conducted a remote usability testing session with users and got my learnings on certain usability issues, so I refined my designs again (and then again after another usability testing)

Constraints

During development process we realized that processing big chunks of data would be quite expensive for the company, therefore it wasn’t that perfect designed flow anymore.
The file upload would take around 5 minutes to process on the server side, but if there are several simultaneous upload requests to the server the queue will be created and it means that it might take up to 30 minutes to process the data. Which raises some questions: how do you communicate that to the user? What should the user do during all this time?
We came up with a dialogue with a friendly and clear message about what is going to happen and what to expect next.
So now the flow looked like: file upload> friendly message that says that it will take some time … > email with a link to result page and a flash message with the link to result page for case when user stays on a platform.

Takeaways and learnings

After presenting new tool to our users the inventory of the platform was doubled in size, besides engineers and success managers had more time to do their actual jobs, instead of uploading domains manually.
Yet there are still things that could have been done better.
Event though we have been doing daily standups and by-weekly retros we we were not agile in our development cycles. We’ve been working on this tool for 2,5 months, refining every pixel of it, instead of putting it to production incrementally and getting user’s feedback faster. Lesson learned.
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Also the initial research process taught me to always challenge “known facts”. We had our customer journeys that were not corresponding with reality and we neglected the voice of our users for too long.
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The next step for this project could have been a mobile friendly tool for portfolio management, it would give a competitive advantage for the organization.