SketchDeck is a creative agency that runs through the platform—a collaboration and project management tool for creatives to work with clients asynchronously. The platform is essential to SketchDeck's business model to work with creatives and clients literally around the world. Its main users are agency managers, consultants, and the agency's clients, all who have unique needs and goals when using the platform.
In 2023, we chose the theme to be the year of the client, focusing all of our efforts on improving the client experience at SketchDeck from all sides of the agency. I set up interviews with clients to understand their needs, frustrations, and goals when using the platform. I went through the interviews and pulled out relevant statements.
categorized relevant statements by: project and asset organization; project review process; restarting projects; find projects; video & audio; the project brief; and Slack.
I created an affinity map with each client's statements and categorized them into preview/review designs; main actions and goals; communication; starting a project; project issues; and random. Main goals and actions was the largest group. While the platform is well set-up for clients to take part in the creative process--reviewing projects and giving feedback--what was not being well addressed is clients who are not power-users who need to find projects and download assets. Even power-users struggled to search older projects and download assets.
We needed a better way for client's to navigate their projects and get their assets. This is one of the main goals for clients and in the interviews it was apparent that the home screen was not serving clients. We decided to update the home screen—client's dashboard and way to navigate their current and past projects.
We leveraged a lot of what was currently built in the platform: project statuses to show the states of the project and other metadata from project. From the statuses, we created tabs to find relevant projects more easily. Needs review was the main state and is the main tab, so when clients need to give input on a project, it is a to-do list. We added badges to a chat button that shows the current chats and will take users directly to the project. We also added a contact card for clients' project manager, to give a face to the agency and a touch-point for clients who don't regularly work on projects. Quick-buttons for a project change depending on the status: give feedback is the main action for projects in review, seeing the latest delivery for projects in process, and downloading files for completed projects.