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Acting as Lead UX Designer in a 3-week sprint, I designed a tool for salespeople to quickly create a high level overview for Business Cases, or value-based pitch document. The existing AI functionality for Business Cases was not being used, and as a result, very few salespeople were actually writing Executive Summaries. The goal of this sprint was to encourage users to create Executive Summaries, and to help them write them in a clean and focused interface.
A snapshot of the features of our redesign:
The user creates a business case in a revised modal flow. The user lands on a clean and focused interface.
Greater control over the order and flow of the deck, with greater options for customization.
Make detailed and precise adjustments to the content of the deck, including type styles, images and other embedded content.
Easily preview AI templates on hover and quickly add pre-filled content to help get started writing.
Minoa is a B2B SaaS start-up that helps salespeople with value selling and co-selling, earlier in the sales cycle, they do this by helping salespeople quickly produce Business Cases.
Business Cases are documents that salespeople create to lay out their value proposition for their customer, which includes a narrative and a financial component. Minoa’s Executive Summary is the first part of the business case a prospect will see and it is an opportunity for the user make a high level summary of their value proposition for an executive buyer.
We needed to add more guidance to the empty state to help users get started.
Users need to be able to customize their business cases, our solution would need to be flexible and give users greater control so they can do what they want to do.
Minoa already had several AI features that got very little usage. We needed to find out why, and make existing AI features more appealing and usable.
I reviewed a handful of competitors UIs, looking closely at AI writing features, empty states and clean, simple interfaces that allow for creativity.
Two competitors that influenced the direction of our process are Google Docs and Notion: screenshots and a snapshot of learnings below.
Notion indicates the keyboard shortcut to open the command menu. Google has a suite of template buttons that a user can select from.
Google docs display a skeleton of the template on hover. Its noncommittal, it prompts users to action and it prevents a truly empty state.
Notion puts all AI, media and text formatting features in a dropdown menu with a keypad trigger, also accessible from a context menu revealed on hover while a block is selected.
After reviewing competitors, I familiarized myself with TipTap block editor suite, the dev team's toolkit we would need to accommodate. Tiptap guided the majority of the formatting and block functionality in our design. The main creative focus was on how to guide the user to action, make sure AI features were visible and easy to use, and create a clean and focused interface.
A couple of rounds of iteration we arrived at our final design. Called out here are the major areas of change from initial wireframe to final, and why we made those decisions.
Introduced quick add AI template buttons, with previews on hover to help user get started quickly, and a command menu to access AI features and formatting options for greater control and flexibility.
Introduced a “slides” concept and block text editor functionality with additional formatting features, and added affordances for uploading and resizing images, documents, video and audio.
Users can now add custom tabs beyond the Minoa defaults. We also introduced new suggested cover images on default, and a new dropdown menu to make changes.
