UX strategy & design direction for business reviews global platform.
How we helped Trustpilot to redesign their platform, internally.
Project background
In 2013, Snapp sent Matt to Copenhagen to Trustpilot's HQ. The intention was to help them with product design and assist with the rebrand which was occurring at the time.
While they had a large development team, their product team was small, with no designers. In order to deliver the redesign, they needed to enhance the product team with UX designers, and implement a culture of product and development teams working much closer.
Getting the team in place.
Before attempting a full redesign of their web service, Rohit Argwal and I realised they needed to implement a process and start hiring key missing roles.
Within the product team, we focused on creating various sub-teams of a product manager, a developer and a UX designer, with specific, prioritised experience improvement goals.
I reviewed their existing offering for problems and opportunities, while deep-diving with members of the Sales, Support and QA teams, to find out what their customers were struggling with, what they needed and what they relied on.
This allowed me to distill and prioritise a list of quick-wins, that the new product team could start creating and implementing, evolving the process and developing a new culture, shipping often, in small bite-sized chunks.
Implementing a rapid iterative process.
In the process of helping redesign their consumer channels and assisting in their rebrand, I implemented a new collaborative, rapid and iterative process. Assisting with key hires and mentoring of existing team members, I helped to form a product team to go on and rebuild their own service.
In order to developing this new culture, I worked closely with Trustpilot's CTO at the time, as well as the lead developers to organise various hackathon-style, mini-team sprints.
This allowed the new product team and engineering team to start to merge and more efficient workflows to be created.
Redesigning the homepage.
With the addition of some key hires, specifically UX designers, and mentoring of existing team members, I could then moved on to redesigning the customer-facing homepage. This was a smooth process as it was built upon the new process and workflows learnt during the quick win sprints.
I decided with the team to redesign the home page before the full service, so it could be created along side the re-brand, with the marketing team. This gave Trustpilot time to consider how they wanted to present themselves and how to communicate it clearly and coherently across multiple channels.
Outcome.
Before leaving Trustpilot in 2014, I envisioned and planned the UX for the customer channels, leaving a team in place to be able to design and build it in a lean and collaborative manner.
What Trustpilot said...
Linkedin: "Matt started a bit out of the blue, but he really had some great ideas and quick wins to improve our user experience in the short term. Longterm he did a fantastic job at coordinating design and process resources to get our flow running."
Ole Sandbæk Jørgensen, Front-end Developer at Trustpilot.
