ViSenze
Empowering merchants to independently integrate ViSenze solutions
My role
Lead designer, responsible for:
Research
Facilitation
Strategy
The team
Ankita, PM
8 other workshop participants
Business impact
Unified product vision and strategy
4.8X faster feature velocity
ViSenze helps retailers make their products more discoverable with Visual AI.
Their solutions include Visual Search, Product Enrichment (Tagging), and Recommendations.
ViSenze’s Visual AI solutions for retailers
To increase revenue, ViSenze aims to accelerate the acquisition of SMB customers. But it’s a challenge due to their...
Complex platform
The existing platform was originally designed for Enterprise customers, who depended heavily on ViSenze’s support team.
Lean support team
Solution Engineers are primarily focused on serving Enterprise customers.
HMW improve the platform such that users are empowered to use it independently?
While the goal is clear, there were opposing views on how to get there.
Some wanted to enhance the platform’s onboarding process and optimize the Shopify integration experience.
Others believed that improving the publishing features and general platform usability would have a greater impact.
Snapshot of a user’s journey on ViSenze’s platform and the areas each team wants to improve
To ensure alignment, I ran a Design Sprint:
5
Workshops
Assumptions
Persona
User Journey
Ideation
Storyboard
10
participants
Brendan
Ankita
Siqi
Zhijiang
Liubo
SongZheng
Hung
Rachel
Gwen
Vadish
5
teams
Leadership
Product & Design
Engineering
Sales & Support
Marketing
In the first workshop, I gathered everyone’s assumptions of our target segment.
FigJam board of the Assumptions Workshop
And listed down the research questions I had...
Who am I designing for?
Who is the user?
What is their job scope?
What do they care about?
Who do they work with?
How are their workflows like?
How do they decide on a solution provider?
What’s important to them when deciding?
How does ViSenze fare against competitors?
Who are ViSenze up against?
How do their end-to-end journeys look like?
How does ViSenze’s experience compare?
...before doing these to get my answers:
Heuristic Evaluation
of
5 competitors
Compared the user journey of the existing platform with that of ViSenze’s direct competitors
User
Interviews
WITH
6 individuals
Spoke to existing customers and internal sales and support team
Desk
Research
ACROSS
5 sources
Analyzed data from StoreLeads, SimilarWeb, G2, and Shopify App Store
After synthesizing the research insights, I shared them with the whole company.
Not only were our assumptions validated, but research served to inform the priority of the pain points we’ve identified.
I also found out that there are 4 main user types involved, and learned how they are structured in Small and Mid-Market Businesses.
Me giving a company-wide sharing on the research findings
Then, I facilitated the rest of the workshops:
01 / Persona
We co-created 4 personas and agreed to focus on Bob the Business Owner.
02 / User Journey
We mapped out Bob’s goals, thoughts, feelings, and pains before reframing them into opportunities.
03 / Ideation
After voting on the most important HMWs, we shared inspiration and brainstormed solutions.
04 / Storyboard
We shortlisted the best solutions and arranged them into a reimagined journey for Bob.
Regrettably, I’m unable to show any other images due to NDA. Please reach out for a live presentation.
By the end of which, the team has co-created a unified product vision which I circulated via a comic strip.
I turned our storyboard into a comic strip to better illustrate our product vision
It received positive feedback, even from colleagues from other departments too
With the storyboard, Ankita (PM) and I created a user story map which we used to chart the path to our shared vision.
The Engineering team also used it to give a rough timeline estimation and plan their resources.
We eventually sliced the product vision into 6 releases.
4.8X
faster delivery
Releases 1 and 2 were shipped within a few months after the release plan was approved.
Do reach out if you’d like to find out...
How I persuaded the team to invest time and resources for this Design Sprint
How I managed the workshop logistics of 10 participants across 3 timezones
How I worked with a challenging workshop participant