The Gradient at work: Building a smart personal contact app
By: Aleksandra Smelianska
Tags: Design Process, UX, Product Design

Expertise: UX Strategy, UX /UI Design, User Testing, Digital Branding, Requirements Management, Product Management, Product Marketing.

Project Team: Agency Partner, Product Designer, Business Analyst, Product Manager/ Product Marketer.

Platforms: iOS and Android.

The brief

There is a reason why almost every time a ‘personal CRM’ product comes out, it says it takes the pain out of managing personal contacts. Contact management space is a common problem, and only growing larger.

Today, we communicate with people across various communication platforms, including emails, messengers and chat apps. From personal experience, we at The Gradient understand the difficulty of maintaining contact lists and ever-growing contact books.

Connections are our most valuable assets. The more connections we get over time, the harder it becomes to navigate and organize our network.

The client came to us with an idea of a product that resonated with our own pain. That’s why we took the challenge of creating a beautiful and simple contact app.

Removing complexity

During the initial research stage, our product team learned that:

most of the traditional CRM products on the market are too complicated and robust for personal use 🙅

many people are still keeping their list of contacts in spreadsheets, it takes a lot of effort and time.

Researching the users’ pain of keeping contacts in tedious spreadsheets and address books, we wanted to create something better. A product that would strip away the effort and frustration.

Everyone designs who devises courses of action aimed at changing existing situations into preferred ones. — Herbert A. Simon

Our goal was to create a super simple user experience that would make navigating personal network easy and fast.

Discovery and Research phase

There are a few methods we used in the discovery phase to jump-start this particular project.

In the beginning, we had a number of assumptions about the problems which we will be solving during our design process. Discovery and research is an important phase at the beginning of a project that helps both our clients and our design team to understand the real pains and problems that we are trying to solve.

A great product is a response to a painful problem, and we use research to make sure we know everything about that problem. First, we should have an understanding of:

Who are the users we are designing for? What are the key tasks those users want to accomplish?

Our potential target audience for the content management solution was incredibly wide and included people who have to manage thousands of contacts at work and their daily lives, for example, top managers, HR managers, entrepreneurs, professional networkers. Working with personas was not an optimal technique in this case.

We decided to follow the Jobs-to-be-Done methodology instead, which is often considered as better suited than personas for product development due to the fact that it’s more objective and measurable. This methodology uses “jobs” as a metaphor to explain what people are trying to achieve when they buy a particular product.

According to Jobs-to-be-Done theory, ‘customers are not buying your products, they are hiring them to get a job done’. Our goal was to understand what that job is and identify what would motivate customers to hire our product.

The key to success is understanding, from the customer’s perspective, what the entire job is and making that job the main point of value creation in a product.

We started by conducting numerous user interviews and identifying the most common tasks and pain points when managing their contacts.