Hyla is a virtual phone software system consisting of two products and it's aimed at small and medium-size businesses. It allows them to scale regardless of location. My role in this project was being the sole designer in charge of the whole user experience from discovery to the final UI design. I worked alongside a team of developers and the Project Manager from the client side.
New businesses usually struggle before reaching their second year. One of the hardships they face is scaling their staff but keeping costs low while looking and sounding professional. Celerity Telecom hired me to design a solution that could help their company grow and also be offered as a service to their existing customer base.
My strategy was to bring simplicity to an existing but complex workflow. Most businesses have Departments (like Tech Support or Human Resources) and each employee from that department has an Extension, which is a number that acts as a proxy for their actual phone number. So instead of dialing the employee's full number, customers can dial something short and memorable (like 104) and get the help they need. Employees also needed to be able to keep their personal and professional calls separate. After mapping existing solutions, I designed a mobile app for employees and an Admin dashboard to manage Departments and Extensions.
As a starting point, I had several meetings with Celerity's employees, since they were going to be users. My main goal here was to understand their pain points and why the products they were using now weren't working for their current workflow. I was very lucky to work with a great Project Manager who made sure I had access to as many interviews as I needed. Turns out most users had difficulties finding the next steps in their journey. It was evident when I mapped the navigation workflow for the product they were using at the moment: it was very wide and shallow, which meant that there were a lot of sections but each one had little content.
I had to understand the process behind building a company. The first step is to determine if the company is going to be local or nation-wide. If it's a local business, we ask them to enter they preferred area code and then suggest a set of available numbers. They can also choose a random number for that area. If the company is going to be nation-wide, we offer them a toll free vanity number (like 1-800-COMPANY). If it's an existing business and already has a phone number set up, they can also port it to Hyla. Once this is defined, they can create their company, name their first Department and add the first Extension.
To organize all the information the users would need to see and interact with, I sketched the first screens using InVision's Freehand. Through conversations with the Project Manager and users I defined the onboarding flow from landing page to account creation. I worked on low-fidelity until I had tested everything a couple of times and the design started to give positive results. Since the team was distributed across different locations, I needed to communicate often to keep things rolling. This was also another factor to keep things low-fidelity for as long as possible. In the meantime I also designed the admin dashboard.