Ruby Mobile App

Ruby

Mobile App

Role: Art Direction, Research, Interaction, Visual & Motion Design

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Ruby’s live virtual receptionists build meaningful connections that make for happy customers, who make successful businesses.

Reception Services + Tech to Keep You Mobile

Background

Cloud-based technology has redefined the office and made it possible to work from anywhere. After releasing the Ruby mobile app late 2015, we have helped and empowered our customers to control their availability while staying on top of their communication.

Data showed us that our customers are using the new feature of ‘Setting Status’ and based on the way many customers are setting their status to ‘Not Taking Calls’ without using other fields or additional options—we believe that people will find the ‘Hold My Calls’ button useful. In addition, we aren’t clear about what fields are optional and which ones are required to set a status. Our assumptions, many users fill them out only because they think they have to.

Opportunity

Quick and easy status change
With Hold My Calls, customers will be able to quickly update their status to Not Taking Calls and bypass all the status detail fields, making it easier for them to make this change without a lot of cognitive load.   

Streamline the customer service workflow
The more we can encourage customers to bypass the Additional Instructions field, the fewer interactions will flow into the customer service queue.   

More appealing Home screen
We’ve been thinking to go with a flat nav menu so the user only has to tap the item once to select it, also to move away from the two circles (Messages and Voicemails). Our hypothesis by changing these UI elements could improve the look and functionality of the Home screen while making room for Hold My Calls.

Objective

We want to find out if users will understand that they can simply set their status to Not Taking Calls if there are no other fields to fill out. Additionally, we know customers use the Home screen to handle almost all status updates and to view their Activity details and Activity list, leading us to believe that Home is the right place for frequent tasks performed by our customers.

The Process

Upon reviewing the analytic insights of the last 31k sessions in the app and keeping our customers at the core of our design process, we defined our design criteria in partnership with Product. As a team we used these to evaluate our ideas against and began our ideation phase with Product, UX, and Customer Service leadership. After multiple rounds of sketching sessions, the outcome was three design concepts to test.

Reduce Friction
Give customers a quick and easy way to set their status, even if they’re walking down the street.

Refine instead of Remove
The existing Home screen is very useful to our customers. In our redesign we’ll take care to preserve the current capability.

User Testing

We conducted a lo-fidelity usability testing with first round of the design concepts and affinitized the data by grouping user quotes that highlight similar issues or opportunities together.

Scenarios

• Lawyer – I’m walking into the courthouse right now and I need Ruby to hold my calls.
• Finance – I’m going into a meeting and I don’t want Ruby to call me for the next half hour.

Participant Demographics

• 5 Participants: Mark, Jill, Marissa, Greg, and Megan.
• 3 Women, 2 Men
• 3 Attorneys, 1 Owner of a tutoring business, 1 Membership director of a business org.
• States: Oregon (2), North Carolina, Texas
• 3 Longtime customers (4+ years), and 1 Newish customer (< 1 year), 1 Brand new customer (<60 days)
• Mix of high and low status use. On average our participants set statuses:
  • Mark: More than once a day
  • Greg: Once per day
  • Megan: Twice a week
  • Jill: 1-2 times a week
  • Marissa: Once a week

What We Learnt—Key Findings

Primary app use
To set a status and returning missed calls.

Hold calls is an attention grabber
Participants were pressing that button for everything when they wanted to set a “more-specific” status, add more details, set a future status… etc. 

Current status doesn’t look tappable
They struggled to discover that tapping on a status would allow them to create a “more-specific” status.

Time is of the essence
The ability to quickly gain information and act on that information was a key concern for all participants.

Multitasking
Several participants mentioned that they are often multitasking while using the app. Examples: Being stuck in traffic, in a meeting, driving, etc.

No one seemed to miss the navigation
We don’t know if users will miss the navigation for doing other tasks, but we do know that almost all the time, they don’t need it.

Design Explorations

Informed by the key insights from our testing sessions, I led the visual and motion design phase and used a motion design tool: Atomic to create a high-fidelity prototype to show the animation and micro-interaction of the new feature Hold My Calls. I focused on the visual exploration of the hold calls button and the current status area, using motion design to:

• Provide useful and clear feedback to the user
• Provide visual cues that acknowledge user input immediately
• Create affordances that look and feel like direct manipulation
• Express the Ruby brand’s personality and voice

Outcome

During development, due to time-constraints and a focus shift in roadmap, we were only able to finish building the new feature Hold My Calls and some design updates to the Home screen. We had to strategize and come up with incremental steps in implementing the complete redesign of the Home screen.

Impact

After 6 months of releasing Hold My Calls in both iOS & Android, we saw an increased use of Status; of which 64% were set using the new feature.

All you need is Ruby and a cell phone!

Background

Jill Nelson (Ruby’s CEO) introduced this vision of providing our small business customers additional services that would allow them the freedom and flexibility to work where and how they want. Our target market was solo practitioners that might not be ready for a receptionist service, but could really use an app that allows them to make, receive and track phone calls and have a little bit of receptionist back up when they can’t do without.

Design Sprints

As a team, we ran multiple design sprints to help break this big and complex problem into smaller pieces that we can focus on. It was important to understand and agree on the problem, set goals, define success and the questions are we trying to answer.

Usability Testing

After exploring different ideas as a group by sketching, talking with stakeholders and looking at examples from competitors and other similar apps, we invited four customers to join us in a remote usability test and to give feedback on two conceptual designs. Each test session lasted 30-45 minutes and participants were paid $100 for their time.

What We Set Out To Learn

Calling Device Contacts
We want to give users a way to call their device contacts without requiring them to import their contacts and to better understand how customers use and think about contacts.

Texting
Texting is a brand new offering that will require us to develop a whole new area. Through testing, we hope to find out what customers think about being able to text their clients from their business number and where we put texting in the app.

Activity
The features ’Choose Your Caller ID’ and ‘Call Forward But No Answer’ create new categories of activity that could be tracked and presented to users. We need to gain a better understanding of what users want to do with their activity records and how users want to organize their activity (Identify which records are most useful, when they are useful, and why).

Usability Findings

User comments, errors, and satisfaction were observed and noted for each session and posted on the wall as individual data points. Then we grouped similar data points to uncover predominant themes, insights, and areas of opportunity.

The workflows work! Though, we identified some key information that is missing in one area. In our testing, all participants completed all 3 tasks with ease, which validated the design of these essential workflows.

• Add a contact
• Call a device contact
• Text a device contact

We did find a place where having more information would help our customers as they might not have all the info they need to make a call. We discovered that if a contact has two or more phone numbers, users won’t know which number they should call, not having labels like work, cell, or emergency, would be frustrating.

Visual clarity is solid in some areas, spotty in others. We still have some thinking to do about our icons, especially in our Activity concept sketches. We used several new icons in our prototype; the interpretation of those icons, was a mixed bag.

• The plus sign for adding a new contact was readily understood.
• The new import icon was a little confusing for users at first, but after clicking on it, they quickly figured it out.
• No one interpreted the icons in the Activity section as intended.

Conceptual Insights

1. Optimize interactions for customers on the go

Our customers are constantly on the move. All the information needed to conduct business has to be at their fingertips wherever they go.

Help customers make calls on the go.

Currently, if customers want to call a device contact and use ‘Choose Your Caller ID’ (CYCID), they have to go through 5 steps. That’s a clumsy process, especially if they’re in a car!

If you build it, they will spoof!

Customers love CYCID but rarely use it because it’s easier to call straight from her cellphone.

More channels of communication is better.

Texting would be helpful for customers, especially when they need to relay important information, but unable to make a call.

Though not everyone is interested in texting.

Some customers are subject to strict regulations by the FCC, therefore they could not use texting.

2. Highlight actionable items

Our customers are busy people. When they go to the Ruby app, they want actionable items brought forward to them. All other information should be accessible, but secondary.

Highlight activity that requires action.

Customers primarily want to see what was missed, so they can make sure that all their clients are taken care of.

3. Communicate value about helpful features at the right time

Not all customers knew about Ruby Contacts. To customers, the Ruby Contact list seems valuable because it’s an easy way to make spoofed calls. Participants responded well to our contextual offer to add contacts after they made a call.

Design Explorations

Informed by the key insights from our testing sessions, I led the design explorations phase on the home screen, focusing on the hold calls button and current status area. During this exploration phase, I used motion design: Atomic to create a high-fidelity prototype to highlight the animation and micro-interaction of the new feature Hold My Calls. 

With motion design, I was able to:

• Provide useful and clear feedback to the user
• Provide visual cues that acknowledge user input immediately
• Create affordances that look and feel like direct manipulation
• Express the Ruby brand’s personality and voice

Creating Intuitive & Delightful Experience

Outcome

Improved Navigation & Recent Activity
Not only that the app’s navigation is simplified, more intuitive and brought forward a feature that customers are using the most—the dialpad; it’s easier than ever to see your latest activity at a glance by showing the caller’s name, call type, and a timestamp.

Enhancements to Ruby Call Activity
The customers can now see all outbound and forwarded calls plus texts right alongside their receptionist handled activity. That’s right! Every business call record in one place.

More Prominent Filter Options
The applied filters are clearly displayed at the top of the Activity screen to improve visibility. 

Stay Connected With Business Texting
We know that for many small businesses, texting is an essential communication strategy and a growing trend. To ensure our customers have everything they need to stay connected, customers now has the ability to text from their business number!