Fieldforce | Robots Made This

My part of the Fieldforce story

About 2 years ago I was approached by a former colleague who was now working for a startup called Fieldforce. They had a great product and they had just signed a huge contract with Time Warner in Colorado. TW wanted to use their software for upcoming network deployment, but it was contingent on a complete redesign of their user interface. So he asked me if I’d be interested in contracting with them as their Director of UX to provide guidance on how to successfully achieve this. I agreed and had the privilege of working with a talented international team from Pakistan. Not only did we get everything done in the required timeline, I also was able to help them out with tradeshow marketing, booth design and a website redesign and relaunch that resulted in over a 1500% surge in web traffic! In my time I was able to train my replacement and leave them with a design library, and updated workflows and processes

THE USER PART

One of the main advantages that Fieldforce had was an expertise in the market and direct access to our user base. Through quite a few meetings, I was able to develop personas, use cases and an extensive list of pain points that needed to be resolved with the new software release. Below is a small sampling of UX screens developed in user base interviews.

I worked hard to create a set of processes to get work completed efficiently. I utilized daily standups during times that worked for both me and my international team. We held weekly reviews with our user base to show product updates and get feedback. We applied feedback into future sprint cycles. We also held weekly internal reviews to go over our timelines. I created and managed Kanban boards within Jira to track sprint cycles, and utilized Confluence to create and maintain our style guide.

STYLE GUIDE

Every one of the 140+ screens built became bricks in the foundation of our style guide. Every opportunity I had, I would pull assets and drop them into confluence, every button choice, header, color, font, dropdown, icon, etc. became a layer and style to be followed. The extra work paid off as I had been able to establish a living style guide in an accessible location that became the backbone of all future screens and slides for Fieldforce.

FIEDFORCE SNAPSHOT

I put together a snapshot of some of the user screens we developed. As you can see, it's very data entry and metrics heavy.

Analytics showed that halfway through the first day we were up over 400%, by the end of the show our web traffic was up over 1500%!

THE MARKETING HAT

MORE THAN JUST A JOB

The good news was that out of the show, we did hit a growth spurt as a company. I honed in on the "not just a job" vibe that really appealed to me and so many other people I knew to develop some social media ads for us.

From what I've heard, this campaign really resonated with their target demographic and yielded the results they were hoping for.

THE ENDING

Taking the opportunity to work with Fieldforce and getting to explore what it would be like to work at a startup was a good choice. It was a very difficult and rewarding job. I learned a lot as a design leader and as a product manager.

If I had a do-over, there are some things I would have done differently (from a timing perspective), but overall I'm happy with the end result and proud of how hard the team worked to accomplish so much in so little time.