Hightail for business

2018 - 2020 • design lead • product design

OVERVIEW

SKIP TO: RESEARCH • PRODUCT WORK • RESULT

Historically, Hightail (previously Yousendit) was designed for single users to send large files. In order to target larger customers, the company started a new collaboration platform, Hightail Spaces, for creative service teams to share, mark up, and approve media files. In 2017, our customers were mostly small agencies in the 2-10 seat range. At the end of 2019, we gained our largest customer yet (JWT), who brings 20,000+ users collaborating on our platform daily. Today, almost 5.5 million users collaborate on Hightail globally, many of them being enterprise users. Our journey to this point involved asking:

After my first year at Hightail, I took over as design leader of our collaboration product, Hightail Spaces. For most of that time, I was the sole or lead designer on these projects, which meant I wore a lot of hats: running research, doing the design work, and planning projects for our roadmap. I could not have done it without the support and advice of my colleagues.

RESEARCH

SKIP TO: OVERVIEW • PRODUCT WORK • RESULT

What kinds of teams use Hightail today?

I built relationships with organizations that use our product by reaching out to them after customer support or sales calls. Eventually, I developed personas around these organizations and evangelized them with all departments to help create context and empathy for our product discussions.

Organizations that used Hightail at the time were usually small design agencies looking for a lightweight tool to quickly communicate with each other around creative assets.

What kinds of organizations can we target?

I talked to bigger organizations that showed interest in our product, but may not actually sign a deal. I discovered that usually a small group within a company will test Hightail and like it, but have trouble getting approval to use yet another tool from their department or company. In addition, the larger the corporations, the more concerns there were around security, privacy, and other features we did not have. In especially large corporations, there were also demands for how our product can integrate with existing tools. I developed personas around these customers that we want to target:

In-app points of feedback

At the time, we were pretty blind as to how our product was doing. I designed in-app surveys at key points in our product for feedback. I focused specifically around getting feedback on cancellations and new features.

Researching market needs

I sourced insights from research reports the creative service industry. These were often starting point for user research.

For example, in 2018, I read about how larger teams usually had a dedicated operational role. This eventually lead to user research around how creative teams organize their operations on Hightail. It resulted with the creation of a new admin role called Space Manager, who can manage all the Spaces in an organization and move approvals along when an approver is on holiday.

Definition and prioritization

From research, I define a list of tasks that needs to be done to improve the product. This list then gets added to the product priority list for the month. It is rated by key team members of the go-to-market team, design, and product team in order of importance, and prioritized to be picked up for design and engineering work accordingly.

PRODUCT WORK

SKIP TO: OVERVIEW • RESEARCH • RESULT

Hightail on other devices

Users want to be notified on activities on files that they are concerned about. But Hightail only had email notifications, which caused a lot of anxiety for users who need to constantly check it. We brought native notifications to our iOS and android apps so that users can choose to get notifications right on their phone’s home screen.

However, for users who don’t have the app downloaded, they are still directed to our web-app, which was made without responsive design. Other users have also expressed the desire to draw annotations on files using their tablet. I started off with redesigning our most trafficked component, the image preview, to be responsive. Going forward, I am making every component I design for other projects responsive as well.

Creating a new manager role

Creative service organizations, especially those with 30 or more members, have dedicated employees who are often titled “traffic managers”. These managers grease the gears of the an organizations by organizing files, prodding approval requests along if they are not getting timely attention, and making sure to redirect work from someone who may be out on vacation.

Before, files were organized in Spaces by individual owners, and an organization had no insight into the totality of Spaces or files that were under their accounts. So, I created a new Space manager role, a user who can manage all organization files, and assign permissions and approvals.

Freeing up sales resources by automating sign up and retention

As our product shifted toward acquiring larger customers, it was necessary for sales to focus on nurturing relationships with big accounts, while still preventing too much churn in our original customer base. I collaborated with sales to design a sing up and retention policy for business users with 30 seats below.

Increase security

We also took pains to increase security on our website to address the needs corporations, including access history, password complexities, and two-factor authentication.

 RESULT

SKIP TO: OVERVIEW • RESEARCH • PRODUCT WORK

Though we were focused on targeting larger businesses for 2019, we also saw a 3.6% increase in revenue on the consumer side side as well. This is probably due to the improved UX and account security that was applied across the product.