Be kind. The world needs it and so do you.
Be kind. The world needs it and so do you.
Be kind. The world needs it and so do you.
Be kind. The world needs it and so do you.
Hello! I’m Sarrah Figueroa, a design strategist who thinks through business goals, customer problems, and technological possibilities to create meaningful customer experiences. In short, I love to design customer experiences and lead teams to think about the people who will use the products they make.
I usually find myself in the most ambiguous and hairiest problems. I don’t mind stepping back and asking why as well as making sure we are solving the right problem for people.
Hello! I’m Sarrah Figueroa, a design strategist who thinks through business goals, customer problems, and technological possibilities to create meaningful customer experiences. In short, I love to design customer experiences and lead teams to think about the people who will use the products they make.
I usually find myself in the most ambiguous and hairiest problems. I don’t mind stepping back and asking why as well as making sure we are solving the right problem for people.
I work with teams to make products
I work with teams to make products
Design of a self-service system for the Medallia applications which allows users to safely perform more than half of the customer success team's servicing tasks on their own with minimal training.
Background
Medallia is considered the industry’s best Customer Experience Management Service tool. Their mission is to create a world in which companies are loved by their employees and customers. They provide the voice of the customer feedback in hospitality, retail, financial services, high-tech, and business-to-business companies internationally.
It took approximately 10 months to get a company up and running with Medallia, and 50% of that time was spent on configuring surveys and reports. There were ~56 screens used in creating a survey. These screens didn’t account for the additional steps needed to invite a company’s customers to that survey or reporting on the survey results to other colleagues.
It was clear that the employee support model was quickly becoming unsustainable and that the existing experience was not ready for companies to use off the shelf.
9 months with multiple releases
(2) Lead designers
(4) Designers & prototyper
(2) Researchers
(3) Engineering scrums
(2) Lead PMs
UX strategy
Design system
Interaction & visual design
Research
Discover and define
Our research team began interviewing customer success employees to understand how they used the tool and where they struggled. There were some customers who were trained to use the engineering-centric tool so we interviewed them as well.
From those interviews we began to understanding users main problems in the system, which enabled the team to create user personas, capture key user tasks, and define design principles.
Scaleable design framework
Our users were technical, but not necessarily people who knew how to code. All the interactions in the product were tied closely to the backend data model which meant they didn’t guide the user on next steps or sometimes the only way to complete actions was by coding.
In order to add a question to a survey, the user first had to work backwards and write out the answers to the question; in the UI the answers were called “Alt Sets.” Creating a report had many of the same pitfalls as creating a survey. It took too long and it was very complex.
Existing framework created the answers before structuring the overall survey. A user would have to complete several steps before knowing what questions would be asked in the survey.
The product scrum team was well on their way to testing an inline editing framework similar to other survey builders out in the market, but this inline framework didn’t support reporting templates.
The team worked on a framework that would work across the full product suite: what you see is what you get (wysiwyg). An editing panel would allow users to see a live preview on the right.
User testing with customer success agents and users showed:

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90% success rate for task completion
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85% confidence level in completing task
Design system
While we rapidly tested various frameworks with users, we were also working on the detail design for visual language, patterns (like drag and drop), and components.
Results
Medallia released a general availability product in July 2017 with success rates +400% and overall satisfaction 2x. Although the visual design has slightly changed over the years, the frameworks created for these applications are still being used today.
