Ceros Admin is a Cloud-based Ecosystem that brings together other Ceros product under a broader structure for enterprises Marketing teams. As the business continues to grow and attract larger scale customers with structured, organized teams, Ceros Admin is evolving into a new era that enables enterprise customers for efficient self team management and collaboration.
The objective is to reduce the barriers to sales and renewal that customer’s describe as they attempt to operationalize their teams within the limitations of our current platform.
To comply with NDA, I have obfuscated confidential information in this case study. All information in this case study is my own and does not necessarily reflect the views of Ceros.
I started to take the team as the Product Designer with the epic of ‘Ceros for teams’ at the beginning of 2019 after Ceros Raises Series C to continue further growth after surpasses 400 Brands, leveraging platform compatibility with the fast growth of mid-large enterprise customers.
The product achieved 50% increase up-sell on Q2, with a renewal rate of 92% for large enterprise customers.
How we did it? I'll share two stories with you.
Permissions was the #1 requested feature through enterprise users ALL TIME in past several years.
Due to current platform structure, the biggest problem is that we only got one type of permission in team which is hard to collaborate or secure content. To better understand how could we help to improve the team collaborating efficiency, we interviewed and went carefully through their every day working flow to figure out what are the pain points.
From research, we found that what users actually needs in their working flow is:
Easy Management
Clear Role permissions
Content Security
We decided to lockdown Previewer to protect unpublished content. Created a 'previewer' role so that preview could only accessible by giving grant. From user journey, we learned and allocate clear detailed permissions in FIVE roles based on team collaboration workflow.
Easy Management need a bigger picture for engineers to build data structure. Timelines and resources are always tight, and multiple related stories are going together at the same time. We believe we should ship amazing product each time and adds on later will make it even better. In order to do that, we need to make sustainable design and structure. Taking the possible future needs from the users, we made this systematic diagram and discussed across team specialist to prioritize and split the epic into three evolution versions for permissions. First version is going to apply to the existing file structure on 'Account' and ‘Project’.
The systematic diagram helped the team to understand a bigger picture of the project, and also works well for me to synthesize the scalable model and figure out the information architecture of permissions v1 quickly.
First step is to see where is the best place to do Permission Management. The project Page was investigated to locate the Permission Management model. According to current platform structure and users' habit, we decided to reuse the existing team button to trigger the model.
It is important to build a product that makes team feel confident that certain content are safe and are only kept to audience each part are assigned to. Following are the steps I attempted to achieve the goal in the team management model: Allocate and Validate.
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I started with exploring options with users most familiar UX for permission management.
However, we quickly discovered potential issues in these iterations through usability testing:
It is confusing to have two areas for invitation, which can be confusing to users
For a larger project team, members can overpass the area for dropdown and the dropdown contains too much information
The tolerance to allow error operation in the model is low, which can cause user panic in assigning/removing roles
I quickly iterated the design and decided to create a multi-task searching box, Status Button and a Secondary Commit Button to bridge the gap
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Invite a new user will result in sending an email to the user instantly if we don’t have a secondary confirmation, same for delete and re-invite. From Usability Testing, I found out that users are afraid of clicking the state button, and trying to escape the model when they changed mind.
The iteration added a secondary confirmation to secure the process of error testing.
In order to help Engineers better understand every possible cases. Process flow are tackled based on the information architecture and discussed with developers to make sure the design covers all possible scenarios and making sense for predictable edge cases.
UI elements are researched and tested to make sure it could fit every single scenario and suitable for scalable future situation.
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As the business is continuously attracting large Organization with multiple accounts, they encountered the problem of hard time sharing files between accounts.
One of our customers is an enterprise who purchased 70+ dealers’ accounts. They encountered the challenge of not enough brand impact over dealers and it is not very efficient for their dealers to start creating experiences.
We got several rounds of interviews with our customer to understand the scenario and get insights of why does it happens. Due to our current account settings, organization is an abstract idea that don't have any functionality over its subset of accounts. Three Insights were taken over from research: Flexible operation, Workflow Optimization are actually what our enterprise users' need.
Timelines are always tight, but we believe and we think we should deliver great product to every customers we have, for every product that I work on, I usually work with the team to sort out in actionable chunks and evaluate to do the Easy to Achieve with High value ones first with scalable foundation for upcoming stages. We aimed to release the MVP within two months with limited dev resources, so we need to get a solution that has the least amount of work to achieve maximum impact. The solution is to have an organization space called 'Template Gallery'.
Based on the scenario and problems our customer is trying to solve as a collaborative team, we came up with first version of workflow to fit their needs.
Through rounds of communications with experts, there are some constraints based on the current platform structure and time limits. So we came up with an Alternative design Strategy.
Although we planned to have a layer for organization, it is not getting developed at that time. So we adjusted the design strategy to make the Organization Account same hierarchy with the dealers accounts, but have bidirectional connection with Template gallery.
In next stage of UX, I split the process to optimize the workflow from two aspects into three sub-tasks: Template Creation, Template Operation and Download Template. UX details are tackled at this point as well.
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Ceros is keeping growing with amazing new features coming through. In Feb 2019, Ceros raised $14 million in Seris C funding. Continuously in July 2020, our great product raised another $100 million investments. Ceros Admin is playing an important role to help scale the product and I really appreciate for the one year starting on and rolling over these two challenging features with all the talented people in the team.
Permissions and Roles were a flag feature for Ceros 7.0 and released in 2020.
Template gallery went live in 2019 and has helped us achieving 50% growth in upsell in Q2,2019. This function has been promoted to other enterprise customers and they have expressed their interest to get this feature and improve their marketing team-collaboration.
If you are also building a product for teams or interested in collaboration, let’s chat!
