My role in the project
- Lead Creative
- Research & Define
- Front-End UX & UI Design
- Application UX & UI Design
What was it:
InteractSMS is simply a service that lets customers send thousands and even millions of SMS messages instantly to customers.
But this product, like no other, allows clients to filter their recipient lists, create vouchers, use geolocations, generate extensive reports and even create their own mobile websites with promotions, maps, vouchers, and many more.
Who was it for:
Phonovation Ltd.
Phonovations flagship service used by companies like Vodafone, Eir, and Home Store & More, among many others. As many competitors were providing the same service, we needed to develop a product that was like no other.
Our ability to send thousands or millions of messages instantly was cutting edge, but we needed something more, something that would make us the market leader in that regard.
After extensive research, surveys within our customer group & competition benchmarking, we came up with a set of features our service would have to have in order to beat the competition.
My role in the project
- Lead Creative
- Research & Define
- Front-End UX & UI Design
- Application UX & UI Design
As a Lead UI/UX designer, I was responsible for conducting research, gathering information, benchmark competition, conducting surveys, creating affinity diagrams & gathering a list of the most valuable features & components needed for our new service.
I needed to make sure the user is not lost within all features and use of interactive SMS service is as intuitive as possible. Also, to provide users with online & offline help tools if they get lost in the application.
Version 1.0 of InteractSMS was very simple & didn’t stand out much from the competition. For example, users could instantly send messages to a list of customers they created in a spreadsheet.
As we found out, the problem was with trying to reach certain customers based, for example, on their age, gender, personal preferences (red or white wine in case of a wine shop). They would have to create separate spreadsheet lists for all of them, and it would take time.
That was our first indication that we would need to create something that would solve that problem for our customers. So going with the punch, we decided to commit research & find out what other features would benefit our customers that would help them reach maximum benefits from our platform.
As our customer base ranges from communications to retail shops & services, we got some interesting feedback. Based on all of it, we came up with a list of features and components that our customers said they need to have an efficient promotional & sale tool.
The list was extensive, but we had to cut it significantly to ensure we have only the most desirable features. The biggest ones were the ability to filter customers from just one spreadsheet list, and our customers could create their own filters and that way precisely reach the audience they wanted to reach with their SMS campaigns.
Reporting was another great feature; our customers would get detailed insights about how many customers received their SMS, opened it, clicked on a link within it, redeemed a voucher, or visited a store.
The ability to create their own mobile website with an editor built-in applications turned out to be a great addition. Our clients could create their own branded small mobile website & they could include text, images, vouchers, stores locations, contact details, and many more in them. They could brand those websites to their liking and automatically link to them in SMS messages sent to their customers.
The list goes on: The ability to create a set of vouchers with QR codes, upload a list of stores and guide users to them based on their geolocation. Create message campaign templates, Schedule campaigns, and many more.
InteractSMS version 2.0 turned out to be a great success, and thanks to innovative application & speed to this day, it is the leading portal used by major market players in Ireland to send bulk SMS.
Project Hindsight
The project took a great amount of time to get right. Research & defining features was very challenging because we had so many items on the list. Some were very interesting but never made it past that stage due to being too niche.
Also, coming up with a way of presenting all those features in a user-friendly manner and having suitable help & tips options on the website for our customers didn’t make this project too easy.
At the end of the day, we made it, and this portal is to this day one of 3 pillars of revenue for Phonovation & is still going strong. I couldn’t be happier about the outcome.
Accessibility is not about designing for the few. It is designing for us all