Directly, Inc.
Description
Process
Impact
Directly hero image
Description
When people experience problems with a product, they navigate to a company's support page. Here, they are often greeted with a virtual agent chat that offers a poor experience, wasting the user's time and leaving them feeling frustrated. Companies that deploy chatbots often spend large sums of time and money to build this poor experience because it's cheaper than employing large call-centers. At Directly, we sought to change all of this. Our team successfully built a virtual agent platform that trained chatbots 10X faster than our competitors and offered better performance. By leveraging the global gig-work economy, we empowered tens of thousands across 60 countries with income generation and accelerated chatbot training for companies from months to weeks. I led the end-to-end UX/UI/research/interaction for this team, shifted Directly's development process to design-thinking-led, established streamlined processes, interaction design guidelines, and a design system. These initiatives increased our development speed by 35%.
left chevron
right chevron
Process
Building a system around a gig economy held a number of really interesting challenges. How do we build a system that aligns the incentives of our gig-workers with those of the company? Prevent gaming the system? Keep them engaged and prevent burnout/churn? Answering these questions started with building an initial pass at a UI and engaging with gig-workers via extensive user testing/interviews. As we continued iterating through the design-thinking process, we collected many learnings, some pre-emptive, and others we could only observe once our UI was in the wild. One example was the number of simple training tasks in a bundle. Users told us they would be comfortable doing upwards of 50 tasks in a group before getting paid. A few weeks after deploying this, our churn rate started to increase. We reduced our task count per bundle and incorporated various forms of gamification. We employed behavioral science concepts, such as the Zeigarnik Effect, to encourage task completion and reduce burnout. I also used motion design to create a more engaging experience for these users, all successfully bringing down our churn rate to under 20% each quarter. Building a multi-sided platform (end-user, Company Admin, gig-worker, internal operations team) was an invigorating challenge, and I am very proud of the experience we built that faced each user type.
Directly admin mocks
Directly Manager screens
Directly Gig Expert mocks
left chevron
right chevron
Impact
Upon GA, our product was successful in creating 17 - 34% customer service cost savings for clients within the first 7 days of deployment. Our gamified gig-expert platform also achieved less than 20% churn rate/year. The repeatable systems I built shortened delivery cycles by 35%. Shifting to design-thinking-led reduced our re-work by 55%. I am proud to have worked with this team to build a virtual agent platform that dually provided significant business value while creating financial opportunity for thousands of people globally.
directly hero
project summary
brand exploration
low/high-fidelity
wireframes
prototypes
client dashboard
admin dashboard
specialist dashboard
design system

Project Summary

What is CVA?

CVA is a Virtual Agent that builds automated conversation flows for you with never-before-seen scale and efficiency.

Our platform enables crowd-sourced individuals to contribute to building automated conversations by completing simple tasks in a gamified gig-work model platform.

My contribution

Designed the end-to-end experience for CVA's multi-sided enterprise VA web platform.

Brand exploration

Low/high-fidelity wireframes

Prototypes

User testing

Final designs

Design system

Interaction design guidelines

Developed task design systems for crowd-sourced individuals to train client NLUs with great efficiency

Shifted the organization to design-thinking led

Initiated ENG-Design collaboration from conception to completion

directly product mocks

Brand Exploration

Who are we targeting, and how do we reach them?

Sync with Sales Team on target market

Pull competitive research & design reference

Color explorations

Information architecture explorations

High-fidelity explorations

Facilitate design feedback sessions & style selection

Collaborate on strategy for execution

‍

Open Figma

CVA brand exploration figma

Low/High-Fidelity Wireframes

What tasks do our users need to complete?

Identify users and tasks they need to accomplish on a macro and micro level.

Break out screens by key functions relating to key high-level tasks.

Collaborate on UX diagrams with product owner.

Build low-fidelity wireframes.

Collaborate with ENG & Product team on functionality and direction.

Design high-fidelity wireframes.

Open Figma

low high fidelity wireframes figma

Prototypes

Ilicit feedback

I built prototypes to help create alignment amongst cross-functional team members, communicate the ideal interaction with our front-end engineer, and test our flows with end-users to continue to refine the experience.

Client Dashboard

How will our clients manage their VA?

There are a handful of client user types that need to complete tasks associated with their roles. Ex. a Business Leader is probably only looking for high-level metrics to report performance, whereas a Customer Service Lead manages and approves conversation flows.

We put together a user hierarchy to define which screens would be most used by which user, allowing us to adjust complexity where necessary to help each user type to complete their tasks with minimal friction.

Admin Dashboard

Who takes care of managing the top-level client account settings?

The Admin Dashboard was designed primarily for the Client Administrative user, whose main tasks include managing the client's account, internal user permissions, and security.

Open Figma

CVA admin dashboard figma

Specialist Dashboard

How will our Crowd Specialists contribute to building automated conversations?

Our Specialist Dashboard enables crowd-sourced individuals to earn cash for completing simple tasks that help train NLUs, among other things related to conversation design. The team developed a performance-based system to incentivize high-quality contributions and eliminate bad actors.

Open Figma

CVA specialist dashboard figma

Design System

How will our designs remain consistent?

Design systems are important in every industry, but are vital when it comes to environments of high-complexity like the AI space.

I developed our design system to enable our Front-End Engineer to locate all assets, allow for easy consumption to all cross-functional team members, and to serve as a clear guide of our design language to new designers.

Open Figma

CVA design system figma
Say hello
hello@austinacevedo.com
linkedindribbbleInstagram