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Things you can learn from redesigns
More than 48,000 real estate agents use our customer relationship management (CRM) software to manage their contacts. A good CRM should enhance the value of managing contacts, but our CRM didn’t provide any ability to filter or search contacts within the page.
In order to improve usability, a complete redesign of the CRM’s contacts list view was in order. But first I had to convince everyone that we really did need to completely redesign it and not just make quick improvements.
Redesign Challenge
Our CRM has been live for over a year and users have been trained on this legacy system. It’s not easy to ask users to switch to a new system without strong, convincing data. From a designer’s point of view, we want to stand by the users and try what we can to improve the user experience in any possible way without asking users to adopt an entirely new system.
Lack of Data
The best way to propose redesign ideas is when you have convincing data in hand. I used to propose redesigns without data, all of which inevitably got rejected. Why? The usual feedback are:
1) Our development team doesn’t have bandwidth for this redesign; they’re overloaded with building new features.
2) Why do we need to redesign? I don’t see any problems here.
3) Are you sure your redesign is better? Is it worth making the investment in time and effort?
Lessons learned! I started to realize the importance of having compelling data to convince the naysayers. Believe me, it smoothed out my redesign journey all the way from the beginning until the end.
Redesign Journey
1. Research
First, I learned to gather data. Users go to our online community to learn how to use our CRM and submit questions and suggestions for improvement. It was a treasure trove of data for my project. I categorized, filtered and sorted suggestions from users and attached a link for each post. I then sat down with product managers to go over the findings and my suggestions for a few redesign ideas.
