Before revamping the extension we had to re-examine the most critical use cases for our users. Through external interviews with users, internal interviews with Customer Success, Sales, and Marketing, these use cases were itdentified and documented.
Next up, turn the use cases into flow diagrams that can be used to build out the UI. This was also an opportunity to validate our assumptions with internal stakeholders and users.
If you're familiar with LinkedIn you'll notice several decorations on the page. The kite's next to users names, the dropdown on the kite, and a custom toolbar were all designed to facilitate users finding contact information of people on LinkedIn for sales prospecting.
All of these decorations had to go. Somehow we needed still facilitate the discovery of contact information on LinkedIn without decorations.
Now that we couldn't decorate people's names with kites, we had to come up with a way to still facilitate the primary use case of the extension namely, get professional contact information of people they find on sites like LinkedIn, Crunchbase, Indeed etc.
The team collaborated and came up with a solution that used the options chrome gave us when text is selected on a page.
Once the text was selected a small window would appear where the user chooses if they want to find contact information at a person or a company.
Despite dropping our decorations we were still able to get users to their prospect's contact information in two clicks. Admittedly, that's one more click than it took before.
That being said, an additional click is infinitely better than eliminating THE reason users love the KiteDesk extension.
We used atomic.io and Invision to demonstrate and do user testing. The prototype allowed for much rapid development since we skipped the wireframing process.
The clickable, flat prototype also saved a great deal of time capturing requirements and acceptance critera.
Our user's knee jerk reaction when we released the new extension was understandably a skeptical one.
Once users spent some time with it, we actually saw greater usage and overall feedback as you can see from reviews on the Chrome Store.