SumAll’s mission is to democratize data: enable SMEs to have access to data that can improve their businesses and tools that can help them act upon it.
I joined as the 15th hire — and third product designer — and left 18 months later with over 50 friends.
I wore many hats in such a growth oriented, transparent, and exciting environment: from working on specific features, to leading design research and mobile product design, to becoming product owner and part of the strategy team.
A strong customer-driven product development mindset and practice.
An iOS app that allowed for user growth and retention.
Research that enabled the team to build two revenue generating products.
Compound monthly user acquisition rate of 28% during 12 months, going from 1k to 15k iOS sign-ups.
A strategic pivot from a generic “premium” package to revenue generating products SumAll Insights and SumAll Reports.
Establishing a practice of human-centered thick data insights that complemented big data research
SumAll was preparing for a new funding round while figuring out products on a path to economic sustainability. Insights about users’ motivations and needs required further depth.
Explorative research can be hard to fit into an agile environment. We got there thanks to three key elements: buy-in and support from the C-suite, a multidisciplinary task force that continuously brought back progress to their functional teams, and a lean and resourceful approach to field research.
The learnings generated in less than 4 weeks created deep knowledge of SumAll customers needs, a vocabulary shared by 50+ people at the company, and a set of tools that everyone could use to ideate, prototype, and test monetizable products.
Ecosystem map
Personas
Optimizing the onboarding experience led to increased footprint while uncovering overlooked pockets of opportunity in the service.
My very first project was to redesign the onboarding experience on desktop web to boost user acquisition by stopping leakages in the funnel, while minimizing the engineering work.
Plenty of platforms to get your data from
As the only designer on the project, I worked in close collaboration with data experts and engineers to align tactics.
The main shift was from user opt-in to user opt-out for the most valuable and common use cases, to minimize user efforts.
For example: from usage data, we identified that the most engaged users connected at least three platforms (Facebook, Twitter, and Twitter Search). The new designs automatically preselected the three platforms most frequently connected.
First step of onboarding: most common platforms preselected
During the process we embedded ways to celebrate users that at the same time would give SumAll more exposure: for example by broadcasting users’ Twitter achievements and mentioning SumAll as they connected their account.
Mindful win-win strategies
Less customer support tickets related to onboarding issues, and a significantly larger percentage of users who completed the onboarding process.
Analysing the data and talking to users brought to pockets of opportunity for user acquisition beyond the scope of desktop web onboarding, including:
The results of these insights were synthesized in a customer journey map that served as a tool for internal alignment and prioritization, and led to the creation of a dedicated iOS team.
Screenshots from the iOS app
