About the Project
About the Project
Flowcase is an online SaaS-based application that empowers professional services firms to create tailored resumes and case studies with ease, helping them to win more bids in less time. The primary goals were to design an intuitive web application that allows users to create, edit and share templates across their company. Templates were traditionally complex, posing challenges for both users and Flowcase’s internal support teams managing customer support requests. This project focused on simplifying the experience for both.
About the Project
Flowcase is an online SaaS-based application that empowers professional services firms to create tailored resumes and case studies with ease, helping them to win more bids in less time. The primary goals were to design an intuitive web application that allows users to create, edit and share templates across their company. Templates were traditionally complex, posing challenges for both users and Flowcase’s internal support teams managing customer support requests. This project focused on simplifying the experience for both.
About the Project
Flowcase is an online SaaS-based application that empowers professional services firms to create tailored resumes and case studies with ease, helping them to win more bids in less time. The primary goals were to design an intuitive web application that allows users to create, edit and share templates across their company. Templates were traditionally complex, posing challenges for both users and Flowcase’s internal support teams managing customer support requests. This project focused on simplifying the experience for both.
My Contribution
My Contribution
As the sole Product Designer, I led a cross-functional team where I facilitated meetings to identify blockers, discuss feasibility and align stakeholders with business goals. I was responsible for the entire UX and design scope of the project, from strategy and conceptualization to final design hand-offs to developers.
My key responsibilities and achievements included:
Defining the product strategy and vision to ensure a user-centered approach.
Leading usability tests and user interviews to collect feedback, uncover opportunities and refine design iterations.
Wireframing and prototyping from low-fidelity sketches to high-fidelity interactive designs.
Ensuring alignment between design, business goals, and technical feasibility to keep the project on track and key stakeholders like the CPO and Customer Success Managers up to date.
My Contribution
As the sole Product Designer, I led a cross-functional team where I facilitated meetings to identify blockers, discuss feasibility and align stakeholders with business goals. I was responsible for the entire UX and design scope of the project, from strategy and conceptualization to final design hand-offs to developers.
My key responsibilities and achievements included:
Defining the product strategy and vision to ensure a user-centered approach.
Leading usability tests and user interviews to collect feedback, uncover opportunities and refine design iterations.
Wireframing and prototyping from low-fidelity sketches to high-fidelity interactive designs.
Ensuring alignment between design, business goals, and technical feasibility to keep the project on track and key stakeholders like the CPO and Customer Success Managers up to date.
My Contribution
As the sole Product Designer, I led a cross-functional team where I facilitated meetings to identify blockers, discuss feasibility and align stakeholders with business goals. I was responsible for the entire UX and design scope of the project, from strategy and conceptualization to final design hand-offs to developers.
My key responsibilities and achievements included:
Defining the product strategy and vision to ensure a user-centered approach.
Leading usability tests and user interviews to collect feedback, uncover opportunities and refine design iterations.
Wireframing and prototyping from low-fidelity sketches to high-fidelity interactive designs.
Ensuring alignment between design, business goals, and technical feasibility to keep the project on track and key stakeholders like the CPO and Customer Success Managers up to date.
The Challenge and Constraints
The Challenge and Constraints
Flowcase customers rely on the platform to eliminate hours of manual work, previously spent copying and pasting hundreds of lines across resumes to ensure consistency and high quality bid deliveries. With Flowcase, they simply create a template, tailor the resume and download the document in minutes.
However, the current tool used to edit templates was not user-friendly or intuitive. Additionally, new compatibility issues with Docmosis (used by internal teams for complex templates) suddenly made a core part of the product fragile, forcing many users to revert to the outdated editor as a last resort.
The challenge was to redesign the Template Editor into a tool so intuitive and efficient that users would rather make their own adjustments than spend valuable time reaching out to customer support. This would not only enhance customer adoption and loyalty, but also reduce the workload for internal support teams - allowing them to focus on creating new, high-quality templates.
The Challenge and Constraints
Flowcase customers rely on the platform to eliminate hours of manual work, previously spent copying and pasting hundreds of lines across resumes to ensure consistency and high quality bid deliveries. With Flowcase, they simply create a template, tailor the resume and download the document in minutes.
However, the current tool used to edit templates was not user-friendly or intuitive. Additionally, new compatibility issues with Docmosis (used by internal teams for complex templates) suddenly made a core part of the product fragile, forcing many users to revert to the outdated editor as a last resort.
The challenge was to redesign the Template Editor into a tool so intuitive and efficient that users would rather make their own adjustments than spend valuable time reaching out to customer support. This would not only enhance customer adoption and loyalty, but also reduce the workload for internal support teams - allowing them to focus on creating new, high-quality templates.
The Challenge and Constraints
Flowcase customers rely on the platform to eliminate hours of manual work, previously spent copying and pasting hundreds of lines across resumes to ensure consistency and high quality bid deliveries. With Flowcase, they simply create a template, tailor the resume and download the document in minutes.
However, the current tool used to edit templates was not user-friendly or intuitive. Additionally, new compatibility issues with Docmosis (used by internal teams for complex templates) suddenly made a core part of the product fragile, forcing many users to revert to the outdated editor as a last resort.
The challenge was to redesign the Template Editor into a tool so intuitive and efficient that users would rather make their own adjustments than spend valuable time reaching out to customer support. This would not only enhance customer adoption and loyalty, but also reduce the workload for internal support teams - allowing them to focus on creating new, high-quality templates.
The Customer
Beginners, Mid-Level and Power Users (Champions of Flowcase)
Template Support Team
Create new templates and make adjustments on behalf of customers.
Customer Success Team
Responsible for customer satisfaction across Flowcase, including templates.
Flowcase
Templates are a crucial aspect of the foundation of the application.
Pain Points and Opportunities
Pain Points and Opportunities
Pain Points and Opportunities
Customers spent excessive time copying and pasting text between manual templates, leading to inefficiency and frustration. Users often relied on customer support teams to make small template changes, causing frustrating delays and communication overhead. Additionally, the current editor was not intuitive, causing users to depend heavily on external support.
Simplifying the user experience of the template editor would not only attract new customers but strengthen existing customer loyalty by giving them more control and a sense of accomplishment over their own process and results. With an intuitive interface, users would be empowered to self-serve, reducing the volume of customer support requests and allowing internal teams to focus on higher-priority tasks.
Pain Points and Opportunities
Pain Points
😖 Copy and paste, manual work
😖 Tedious emails
😖 Dependent on template support
Pain Points
😖 Copy and paste, manual work
😖 Tedious emails
😖 Dependent on template support
Pain Points
😖 Copy and paste, manual work
😖 Tedious emails
😖 Dependent on template support
Pain Points
😖 Copy and paste, manual work
😖 Tedious emails
😖 Dependent on template support
Opportunities
✅ Customer adoption and loyalty
✅ Less strain on internal teams
✅ Buzz-factor, Community, Webshop
Opportunities
✅ Customer adoption and loyalty
✅ Less strain on internal teams
✅ Buzz-factor, Community, Webshop
Opportunities
✅ Customer adoption and loyalty
✅ Less strain on internal teams
✅ Buzz-factor, Community, Webshop
Opportunities
✅ Customer adoption and loyalty
✅ Less strain on internal teams
✅ Buzz-factor, Community, Webshop
The Vision
The Vision
Our vision was to create a template editor that would streamline the proposal-building process by enabling users to make swift edits with a live preview that pulled relevant team data to ensure the highest quality for their winning bid submissions. To achieve this, we prioritized delivering minimum viable features quickly by identifying key features that users needed most. By adopting an agile methodology, we aimed to design a product that was not only efficient and highly usable, but also adaptable to user feedback.
The Vision
Our vision was to create a template editor that would streamline the proposal-building process by enabling users to make swift edits with a live preview that pulled relevant team data to ensure the highest quality for their winning bid submissions. To achieve this, we prioritized delivering minimum viable features quickly by identifying key features that users needed most. By adopting an agile methodology, we aimed to design a product that was not only efficient and highly usable, but also adaptable to user feedback.
The Vision
Our vision was to create a template editor that would streamline the proposal-building process by enabling users to make swift edits with a live preview that pulled relevant team data to ensure the highest quality for their winning bid submissions. To achieve this, we prioritized delivering minimum viable features quickly by identifying key features that users needed most. By adopting an agile methodology, we aimed to design a product that was not only efficient and highly usable, but also adaptable to user feedback.
The Process
The Process
Although the project officially began in 2023, the transition from UX Intern (where I focused on creating templates for customers using Docmosis) to Product Designer played a key role in laying the groundwork for this product. Drawing from years of experience, I empathized with template makers and organized a workshop with Customer Success and Support teams to align on customer needs and pain points. In addition to reviewing a backlog of customer requests in Productboard, this collaboration helped us identify the most pressing issues customers were facing in order to set the direction for the next steps in the design process.
I then took the lead in organizing a series of usability tests with our existing template tools, remaining mindful of my potential bias given my previous experience with templates. These tests provided valuable insights into user pain points and behavior, which directly informed later design iterations. To be sure our iterations addressed these findings, we followed up with a private beta test to further validate our approach and designs.
Given that this was the first version of the new product and the number of customers experiencing compatibility issues was growing, we prioritized getting the product into users' hands as quickly as possible. This was critical in preventing customer churn and internal burnout, while also allowing us to gather real-time feedback to refine the product.
The Process
Although the project officially began in 2023, the transition from UX Intern (where I focused on creating templates for customers using Docmosis) to Product Designer played a key role in laying the groundwork for this product. Drawing from years of experience, I empathized with template makers and organized a workshop with Customer Success and Support teams to align on customer needs and pain points. In addition to reviewing a backlog of customer requests in Productboard, this collaboration helped us identify the most pressing issues customers were facing in order to set the direction for the next steps in the design process.
I then took the lead in organizing a series of usability tests with our existing template tools, remaining mindful of my potential bias given my previous experience with templates. These tests provided valuable insights into user pain points and behavior, which directly informed later design iterations. To be sure our iterations addressed these findings, we followed up with a private beta test to further validate our approach and designs.
Given that this was the first version of the new product and the number of customers experiencing compatibility issues was growing, we prioritized getting the product into users' hands as quickly as possible. This was critical in preventing customer churn and internal burnout, while also allowing us to gather real-time feedback to refine the product.
The Process
Although the project officially began in 2023, the transition from UX Intern (where I focused on creating templates for customers using Docmosis) to Product Designer played a key role in laying the groundwork for this product. Drawing from years of experience, I empathized with template makers and organized a workshop with Customer Success and Support teams to align on customer needs and pain points. In addition to reviewing a backlog of customer requests in Productboard, this collaboration helped us identify the most pressing issues customers were facing in order to set the direction for the next steps in the design process.
I then took the lead in organizing a series of usability tests with our existing template tools, remaining mindful of my potential bias given my previous experience with templates. These tests provided valuable insights into user pain points and behavior, which directly informed later design iterations. To be sure our iterations addressed these findings, we followed up with a private beta test to further validate our approach and designs.
Given that this was the first version of the new product and the number of customers experiencing compatibility issues was growing, we prioritized getting the product into users' hands as quickly as possible. This was critical in preventing customer churn and internal burnout, while also allowing us to gather real-time feedback to refine the product.
User Interviews and Usability Testing
User Interviews and Usability Testing
User Interviews and Usability Testing
Our primary goal during the usability testing sessions was to observe how users interacted with and navigated through both the old editor (to identify key features) and the new redesign (to test user behaviour between iterations). Participants were asked to complete a series of tasks, each accompanied with an alignment scale from 1 to 5, which they used to rate their experience after finishing each task. It was emphasized that there were no right or wrong answers, and that our focus was solely on capturing their unique experience with the tool.
Usability testing was crucial in determining whether customers felt empowered to create their own templates, rather than just focusing on whether or not they could complete the task. We knew we had to build a tool so easy to use that users would look forward to make adjustments because they knew how to do so.
After a few iterations (seen below), we found that many users not only navigated the editor with ease but also wanted to retain early access to the tool after the testing period. This value feedback reinforced our belief that simplifying the process would drive user adoption and self-sufficiency - both of which were key goals for the project.
User Interviews and Usability Testing
Our primary goal during the usability testing sessions was to observe how users interacted with and navigated through both the old editor (to identify key features) and the new redesign (to test user behaviour between iterations). Participants were asked to complete a series of tasks, each accompanied with an alignment scale from 1 to 5, which they used to rate their experience after finishing each task. It was emphasized that there were no right or wrong answers, and that our focus was solely on capturing their unique experience with the tool.
Usability testing was crucial in determining whether customers felt empowered to create their own templates, rather than just focusing on whether or not they could complete the task. We knew we had to build a tool so easy to use that users would look forward to make adjustments because they knew how to do so.
After a few iterations (seen below), we found that many users not only navigated the editor with ease but also wanted to retain early access to the tool after the testing period. This value feedback reinforced our belief that simplifying the process would drive user adoption and self-sufficiency - both of which were key goals for the project.
Low-Fi Protoypes and Iterations
Low-Fi Protoypes and Iterations
Key Insights & Takeaways
Key Insights & Takeaways
Within three months of the new Template Editor being launched, we saw a 237% increase in new templates created using the editor. The final version of the Template Editor significantly improved user experience, allowing customers to seamlessly create and edit templates. They gained greater control of the creation process and became more self-sufficient in doing so.
A key factor in the project's success was cross-functional teamwork, where communication with Customer Success Managers was crucial to follow up key customers who had been significantly impacted by compatibility issues. I also led a workshop for both the Customer Success and Support teams to foster collaboration and ensure everyone was aligned on customer needs and the key features needed to improve the Template Editor. This ongoing collaboration allowed us to understand pain points directly, prioritize features and ensure the product met customer expectations.
One major takeaway was the importance of maintaining a user-centric design approach and staying agile in responding to feedback. Looking ahead, there's an exciting opportunity to integrate an AI document agent into the Template Editor. This could automate template customization by extracting brand assets from customer-uploaded designs, streamlining workflows, and giving the product a competitive edge. By providing professional services firms with smarter, faster ways to build proposals, the Template Editor could further enhance efficiency, positioning Flowcase as an indispensable tool in a complex, fast-paced market.
Key Insights & Takeaways
Within three months of the new Template Editor being launched, we saw a 237% increase in new templates created using the editor. The final version of the Template Editor significantly improved user experience, allowing customers to seamlessly create and edit templates. They gained greater control of the creation process and became more self-sufficient in doing so.
A key factor in the project's success was cross-functional teamwork, where communication with Customer Success Managers was crucial to follow up key customers who had been significantly impacted by compatibility issues. I also led a workshop for both the Customer Success and Support teams to foster collaboration and ensure everyone was aligned on customer needs and the key features needed to improve the Template Editor. This ongoing collaboration allowed us to understand pain points directly, prioritize features and ensure the product met customer expectations.
One major takeaway was the importance of maintaining a user-centric design approach and staying agile in responding to feedback. Looking ahead, there's an exciting opportunity to integrate an AI document agent into the Template Editor. This could automate template customization by extracting brand assets from customer-uploaded designs, streamlining workflows, and giving the product a competitive edge. By providing professional services firms with smarter, faster ways to build proposals, the Template Editor could further enhance efficiency, positioning Flowcase as an indispensable tool in a complex, fast-paced market.
Key Insights & Takeaways
Within three months of the new Template Editor being launched, we saw a 237% increase in new templates created using the editor. The final version of the Template Editor significantly improved user experience, allowing customers to seamlessly create and edit templates. They gained greater control of the creation process and became more self-sufficient in doing so.
A key factor in the project's success was cross-functional teamwork, where communication with Customer Success Managers was crucial to follow up key customers who had been significantly impacted by compatibility issues. I also led a workshop for both the Customer Success and Support teams to foster collaboration and ensure everyone was aligned on customer needs and the key features needed to improve the Template Editor. This ongoing collaboration allowed us to understand pain points directly, prioritize features and ensure the product met customer expectations.
One major takeaway was the importance of maintaining a user-centric design approach and staying agile in responding to feedback. Looking ahead, there's an exciting opportunity to integrate an AI document agent into the Template Editor. This could automate template customization by extracting brand assets from customer-uploaded designs, streamlining workflows, and giving the product a competitive edge. By providing professional services firms with smarter, faster ways to build proposals, the Template Editor could further enhance efficiency, positioning Flowcase as an indispensable tool in a complex, fast-paced market.