truDigital is a B2B, SAAS for digital signage. the truDigital platform gives enterprises the tools to manage employee and customer facing content across hundreds of screens. Enterprises can schedule and display both static signage designs and dynamically updating data through dozens of common integrations like live weather & news, social media feeds, or back-of-house task schedules
As a start-up, the software was originally designed and built by a single developer. With no updates or consideration to user experience design in 7 years, I was tasked with bringing the platform into the modern software market through contemporary UX and visual design practices.
It was important to define the user personas we are serving. It was found that most of truDigital's customers fall into two categories: the corporate user managing dozens of screens across locations, and the low-lever user (e.g. a store manager) managing just a few screens at their local location. The ideal path for getting content to the screen is slightly different for each persona and dictated the macro-level structure of the new platform.
In order to take advantage of the highly tenured support, sales, and development leads' experience working with the current platform, I used extensive wireframing for generating solutions and speeding up cross-team discussions.
thorough interactive wireframes were also essential for pitching solutions to the high level stakeholders. Leadership and product owners have been working with an essentially unchanged platform for years, so justifying every design choice was important for stakeholder buy-in.
I integrated in the development team to fully understand the limitations of what can be built and at what cost. I familiarized myself with the functional frameworks being used so I could design for low-cost/high-impact solutions.
Further, I trained in agile front-end development so I could directly write HTML, CSS, and Javascript.
Being a small team, and the solo designer on the project, I had to build tools to get a lot done quickly. Constructing the light-weight truDigital design system allowed me to prototype a massive, complex software by myself.
High-fidelity prototypes were essential for getting every department on board and designing a cohesive, intuitive experience out of a big, complex software. The design system helped me move quicly as the solo designer, and gave both me and the rest of the development team blueprints for building solutions.
A big new feature set served corporate users. Campaigns gives users an easy and quick way to deploy sets of content to screens based on certain parameters like location or front-of-house/back-of-house with scheduled display time. User's have used this feature to distribute HR initiatives, weekend promos, and important announcements.
I used principle of information "chunking" to make the campaign builder easy to use for both new and experienced users. The builder takes the user through one step of the process at a time so they aren't overwhelmed or confused. However, multiple navigation paths let experienced users quickly jump around where they need to.
Early reports are showing that we are better serving large, enterprise customers. Instead of trading in small 2-3 screen customers, truDigital is increasing revenue by attracting bigger customers now that the new platform easily handles hundreds of screens.
Better on-boarding, more intuitive navigation and tools, and emphasized tutorial resources. Because of these things, the customer support team is seeing fewer support tickets and having to take fewer calls. Support costs are down and a smaller team can has the bandwidth to support more customers.
© Jacob Whitlow