Redefining Twilio Insights
| December 2022
Background
Twilio is a cloud-based customer engagement platform that empowers businesses to connect with their customers through multiple channels, including messaging, voice, video, email and more. When companies subscribe to Twilio’s services, they gain valuable access to analytics and performance data across these channels, helping them optimize customer interactions.
My Role
Lead Product Designer
• Understand the problem space
• Identify the current/future state of the product
• Align stakeholders on overall product vision
• Create a UX vision project plan
My Team
Insights and Intelligence team
• Director of Product
• Director of Engineering
• Product Manager
• UX Researcher
Constraints
• Tight deadline
• Multiple key stakeholders
• No baseline research
Why are we doing it?
In 2022, the Twilio Console experience made it challenging for users to fully understand and derive any meaningful insights across products. The Director of Product for the Messaging Insights and Intelligence business unit, wanted to establish a clear, unified Insights vision for all of Twilio’s communication products. We wanted to get alignment at our Insights and Intelligence virtual offsite so we could start planning for this project.
The Current State
Apply what we know
• Mapped out finalized upcoming work on affected areas
• Understand what areas are going to be deprecated
• Keeping in mind future company wide changes
• Identifying quick UX wins
Identify existing issues
• Not scalable to incorporate new or existing products
• Dated visual design, not utilizing design system components
• Difficult to take away meaningful insights
• Lots of UX debt
The customer
The team had not conducted user research in over three years and lacked a clear understanding of who their customers were. The decisions for this portion of the project were based on information we had at the time. A key component of this vision project was to establish a foundation by conducting baseline research, enabling us to gain a deeper, more accurate understanding of our customers.
Needs
• Want insights that reflect their use case
• Quickly identify issues
• Monitor traffic and health of products
Pain Points
• Not to familiar with the Console UI
• Difficult to analyze the data
• Can’t find what they are looking for
Stakeholder alignment
Process
Align product vision with Insights and Intelligence team
• Held weekly 1:1 sessions
• Understand technical feasibility
• Get overall team buy in
After getting buy in from my team, I would start to socialize the vision with potentially impacted Communication teams
• Align all teams with the future goal
• Understand technical feasibility, timeline, and feedback
Presented
vision
After gaining alignment with my immediate stakeholders, I presented our vision to the broader Insights and Intelligence team at our virtual offsite.
Design principles
• Scalability
• Cross-channel
• Customization
Core themes
• Improved navigation
• Roll up at channel level
• Surface errors
• Use case focus
• Consolidate duplicative areas
Jobs to be done
• Align with other teams
• Begin user research to validate vision
• Iterate designs and get feedback
Communications Dashboard
Messaging - All Channels
Messaging - Engagement
Messaging - Downloads
Results
Buy in from broader team
After the offsite, I was able to get buy in across the Insights and Intelligence execution teams. The next step was to socialize the vision with other potentially impacted teams.
Plan for next steps
To make sure everyone was aligned, I created a rough UX vision plan and kicked off with the UX researcher to start on base line research and validating the vision.
A high fidelity mock of the direction I was exploring.