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Dashboard.

Meeting expectations, matching competition.

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First impressions matter. Just like we might judge a book by its cover, we judge digital products by their landing pages. Dashboard was ours. And what an impression it made - of a disorganised, confusing, oftentimes buggy space where users high expectations came to die (or worse, to be put in the backlog).

*Sastrify is a leading European SaaS management software startup helping hundreds of customers achieve cost savings through benchmarking, negotiation and procurement support, renewal tracking and tool recommendations.

Context

As part of a larger redesign initiative at Sastrify I was tasked with the redesign of Sastrify landing page called Dashboard (renamed Overview). We repeatedly lost customers and deals due to platform UI immaturity. Internally we had just introduced a new design system and revised our platform architecture, which made this the perfect opportunity to start introducing new components and UX patterns and a core project for future platform evolution.

Research & Discovery

I gathered existing feedback received from customers, customer management teams and sales and scheduled several calls with our customers to confirm key pain points that I could address with a brand new landing page. I asked about their expectations and struggles and also made sure I took our business requirements into account - so that the new design would be in line with our marketing and sales presentations and we met potential future customers' expectations.

I learnt that...

  • Existing interaction with the page was minimal (<20 clicks in 3 months)

  • It did not provide the actions users were looking for when they came to the platform

  • Overdue alerts, a key feature for our users, were shown incorrectly or not at all

  • Notifications or updates were missing or not relevant

  • There were very few actionable items

  • It was difficult for users to understand which information is most important

  • UI was inconsistent, old and often buggy

  • We were losing deals to competition, due to platform immaturity and lack of offered features.

Solution Concepts

My goal was to design a page that is informative and actionable. It should be a reference for our customers that is reliable, feels intuitive and looks nice. I based it on our customer individual personas and tasks specific to them as well as internal feedback and requirements. I used a modular approach which will allow us to easily add new cards to the dashboard and eventually make it fully customizable.

I considered customer needs:

I created dedicated sections in the page that serve specific user roles within our platform:

  • IT Admin can see the overview of tools, open and action requests and review upcoming and overdue items

  • Finance can see an overview of spend, potential savings and upcoming renewals that supports their budgeting tasks

  • Procurement can see updates on ongoing requests and conversations

  • Tool owners get a personalised view of tools that are relevant to them.

And aligned with business requirements:

I worked with sales and senior stakeholders to ensure our new landing page helps us retain the right customers and target new customers that fit within our ICP.

  • I added a renewal calendar to match our competitors' offering

  • I used new design system components and created patterns that will later spearhead the redesign of other pages

  • I ensured the page was actionable and created value for our users straight away

  • I added a space for optimisation and savings which supports one of our key value propositions

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Design Challenges

  1. Finding the right balance of data to show - just enough for users to know what to do but not as much as the dedicated detail pages.

  2. Addressing different personas’ needs without overcrowding the page and deciding on the right data hierarchy.

While designing the concept, I relied on my knowledge and understanding of our customers and continuous support and feedback of customer success managers. I followed up with user testing to ensure our assumptions were correct.

Validation

My design went through several rounds of feedback.

Customer support feedback

Customer facing teams provided initial feedback and helped shortlist customers for user testing

Stakeholder review

I made sure everyone was aware of changes we would be introducing and those changes aligned with business goals, our roadmap and sales prospects' requirements.

Stakeholder feedback

Design review

Design team helped provide feedback on UI direction and highlight any other work in flight that might affect this project.

Design Review

User testing

Finally, the concept was user tested with 13 companies to gather first hand feedback. Users were shown a prototype and asked to give general feedback as well as answer some specific questions:

  • Do you expect to see all tools or only your tools?

  • Does the order information is presented in make sense?

  • What kind of notifications are most important to you?

  • What renewal information is the most important?

  • Which section provides the most value to you?

  • Is anything here not relevant / unnecessary?

  • Is anything missing?

Learnings

General sentiment towards the concept was extremely positive. 7/13 customers felt calendar view delivers most value. All other sections were highlighted as high value by at least 3 customers

As expected

  • Users expected the view to be tailored or customisable based on user role

  • Information layout made sense

  • Status indicators were useful

  • Users were able to use notifications panel to navigate to the relevant subscription, request or thread

  • Users expected to be notified about tasks, messages, status updates and required actions

Potential improvements

  • Customers expected to be able to book a call with the CSM directly

  • Renewal information should include cancellation / auto - renewal period, value of contract and tool owner

  • Spend was missing a timeframe

Good to know

  • Calendar focus is expected to be entirely on renewals

  • We gathered a few more requirements for specific notifications and reminders

  • Distinction by departments is extremely important to our customers (A feature we did not have at the time)

I created a second iteration of the design, including some of the customer feedback that we were able to address immediately.

  • More information on subscription spend

  • Indication of cancellation and renewal periods

  • Link to customer support calendar

  • Spend timeframe

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I also highlighted a request that came up in the majority of our testing sessions that we were unable to address since our platform did not track departments at the time (We have since then addressed this :) - you can find its implementation under my other projects)

Development & Implementation

Based on perceived customer value, we were able to prioritise development and release some features early to our beta customers

Tool status card + contact card

Calendar view

Requests  visualisation

Spend section

Notifications

Requests gallery

Since we needed to set up a new page layout and the code on existing page was very old, we decided to start from scratch. This meant we were able to show incremental progress in our development environment but were unable to fully release until everything was completed. It did however open up beta testing possibilities as we were able to pick and choose which customers to onboard onto the new page.

I provided a detailed handoff, individually listing new and custom components, including different states, functionality and notes. Throughout development we reviewed progress on a daily basis and ensured functionality was understood and implemented correctly

Challenges

Dependencies on other work

I intended for the page to be customisable, so that it would be better tailored to different types of our users. However, as other teams were working on user roles and departments this would require a significant amount of additional work, we were unable to deliver within required timelines.​

We retained automatic customisation based on tool ownership, so that users would only see subscriptions relevant to them. We descoped the full customisation with the view of revisiting once we have a clear role and department structure

Tight deadlines

Sales heavily relied on the delivery of this work in order to close several high value deals. We had to meet or exceed competition fast.

Based on customer feedback and overall usage levels, we delivered one of the sections with a reduced functionality. Additionally, we decided to leverage an existing notifications solution rather than building one in-house. This provided a similar functionality much quicker at the cost of a less branded and consistent UI.

Results and Impact

Internally, this project paved the way for many future developments, since we introduced a new page layout and created many reusable components. We were able to resolve many existing layout and styling issues and provide new data points and actionable insights that drove user engagement and helped us win new customers.

Won $400k in new deals signed after prospects saw upcoming features and new platform UI

$$$

From less than 20 to 641 interactions over 3 months

Engagement

Old overview design
New overview design
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