Plannerly

Design a cloud-based BIM (Building Information Modeling) management software.

Team

CEO, VP of Operation,
2 Front-end Dev & myself

Tools

Sketch, Figma, Trello, Canny, Haroku, Intercom, Google analytics

Timeline

6 months
Duration

Project Overview

Planning in the design and construction industry is complex! Misalignment between different construction sectors is estimated wasting trillions of dollars per year in the Design and Construction Industry! For this project I worked with developers, strategist, owner to redesign the informational architecture, visual standard, UI and rebranding in a span of 4 months.

The Challenge

It is very inefficient in traditional coordination to implement different standards across different industries. The goal of the project was to simplify BIM process depends user's need, build trust for the brand, increase sign up and improve profit margin.

User Research

The Empathy map helps the team to understand 'A Day in Life' of a BIM manager, and show user’s perspective regarding the tasks related to the product.

Find Process for Your Team

We conducted a survery with 20 current users and had a Net Promoter Score above 70. We gauged product market fit by asking question like - “How disappointed would you be if you could no longer use this product?"

Our team gathered design feedback from webinar, Intercom and prioritized feature requests through Canny. We used an Effort/Impact Matrix to prioritize tasks and put them into Trello.

We listened to user’s feedback and iterated quickly in an agile workflow which is a two week sprint cycle.

The primary action was not clearly defined and the UI was using the same color without a clear hierarchy.
Global share feature was confusing to users and share without permission raised privacy concerns.
Redesigned the library slide panel, so users could drag-and-drop templates onto the Plan quickly.

Figure out what metrics and data to capture

I discussed the goal of this project with the CEO:
How might we grow our user base as well as engagement (time per sessions) for Plannerly users?

We set up proper funnels in Google Analytics and Intercom to measure session durations, (30 mins or less), then measure how many sessions they used the app before they converted to paying customers.

The primary action was not clearly defined and the UI was using the same color without a clear hierarchy.
Global share feature was confusing to users and share without permission raised privacy concerns.
Redesigned the library slide panel, so users could drag-and-drop templates onto the Plan quickly.

Interviews with users

I conducted several interviews with stakeholders, as well as 5 users from different areas to hear the needs and strategies for the app. The new design needs to mindful with legacy users' need and maintain the design system while rapid prototyping

Highlights Of The Site Audit

The existing of the desktop app and steady growth of MAU was the validation of product market fit, however it needs a cohesive design and a style guide to establish hierarchy among different modules. Here are some highlights of the improvement on retention and communications.

The primary action was not clearly defined and the UI was using the same color without a clear hierarchy.
Global share feature was confusing to users and share without permission raised privacy concerns.
Redesigned the library slide panel, so users could drag-and-drop templates onto the Plan quickly.

Web App v1

UX Improvement

Here are some highlights on retention and communications:
‍

Notable added features included Notifications and Activities
‍
Added @mentions to notify team activities when a team member addedor assigned a task
‍
A help section, which included video tutorials to guide new user experience, encouraged a quality feedback loop

The primary action was not clearly defined and the UI was using the same color without a clear hierarchy.
Global share feature was confusing to users and share without permission raised privacy concerns.
Redesigned the library slide panel, so users could drag-and-drop templates onto the Plan quickly.

Project detail

I used Figma to separate project detail page from Plan section and give users an area to add project links and let their viewers access important info on the project.

Plan Module

Scope Module

Track Module

Doc Module

Design System

Based on the complexity of the platform, it's key to have a design system to keep consistency and speed up the process. I built a component-based system in Figma, including basic guidelines such as colors and typeface in addition to all the UI elements for forms, buttons and other web elements we planned to reuse.

Website Redesign

Beside the new identity design. I also contribute on the website redesign and sign up flow, which increase the signup rate by 30%.

Driving consistent growth

The design overhaul of the Plannerly App doubled active users by 105% in 6 months‍
www.plannerly.com‍

Learnings and Next Steps

We created an idea broad to collect user suggestions and gather user feedback for the next design sprint. It is very useful to listen to customer and take their inputs in the development.

Localization - Be concise in word choices. When possible, use icons that have a general understanding from various cultures.
‍
Re-engagement - Due to the timeline, we left some features out of the scope. We will design and implement Notification & Activities, so it can prompt feedback and collaboration among users.
‍
Improve On-boarding - Plan to integrate with Intercom's Product Tour to guide users with new features, and engage the 1st time experience.

Results