Hiver Analytics - Reports Module
Hiver is a chrome extension that works like a helpdesk inside Gmail. It brings collaboration features inside Gmail using the shared mailbox concept. In businesses, shared mailboxes help teams by enabling them to share their responsibilities (they can perform multiple actions like reading, replying, drafting messages, etc.) on emails.
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My Role
I led the end-to-end design of Hiver Reports.
​Research → User flows → Wire-framing
→ High-fidelity design → User testing
→ Implementation
Collaborations
VP of Product,
Product Manager,
7 Engineers & QA,
Product growth,
Customer success manager.
Product
Hiver - Chrome extension
based Helpdesk tool
Duration
2020 (12 weeks)
The Design Process
Overview
Hiver is a customer support platform built for teams using Gmail. It allows teams to manage shared email inboxes, such as support@ or info@, directly from Gmail. With Hiver, teams can collaborate on customer queries, assign emails to team members, track performance, and ensure smooth communication without leaving the Gmail interface.
Problem Statement
Hiver is used by support teams, sales managers, finance teams, and many more. The primary issue was that users needed a simple yet powerful way to analyze their business data. Today, Hiver doesn’t support any Analytics, users end up integrating data into google data studio kind of tools and sift through a lot of irrelevant data to make decisions. Leading to frustration and missed opportunities for quick decision-making. From a business perspective, we also needed to design features that would cater to users with different plans, providing value at every tier while incentivizing premium upgrades.
Research
I started by conducting extensive user research and competitive analysis to understand how current analytics tools were falling short. I interviewed users from various business roles and discovered that different user segments required different levels of dashboard customization. For example, basic users were primarily interested in at-a-glance metrics, while more advanced users wanted deep dives into complex data sets. These insights helped us define a tiered feature set, which laid the foundation for upsell opportunities by offering advanced functionalities to premium users.
Advanced user
Basic user
Use cases
Various teams require data tailored to their specific needs.
Hiver is used by businesses across different verticals - ranging from logistics and B2B companies to educational institutions and travel brands. Hiver is found useful in multiple types of teams - support, sales, finance, and operations, to name a few.
Support team
→ Workload on teams
→ Time taken to respond to queries
→ Time taken to resolve an issue
→ Customer satisfaction
& many more
Icon source: Freepik
Travelling agency
→ No. of leads reached out
→ Time taken to close the deal
→ Type of enquiries
University
→ Amount of journals in progress
→ Time taken to publish a journal
Competitive analysis
Studied different reporting systems in the existing tools to observe the system behavior, navigation flows, and product design.
Metrics
After studying the user requirements and business needs, the product team came up with a few metrics for the initial release. To serve the user needs with a simplistic experience, and also with the competitive analysis, we categorized the metrics into four different groups.
Some shots of various brainstorming sessions
and sketches from the project
Design evolution
Rapid prototyping
With rapid prototyping, I worked to solve high-level challenges like navigation, data visualization, and information positioning. Validated these with the stakeholders and in-house supporting team [users].
✔ Stakeholder Reviews
✔ User Testing
✔ Engineering Team Discussions
v0
Feedback:
-
Long scroll, not so easy to navigate.
-
Metrics need to be more organized.
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Some customers run their companies during business hours.
v0.1
Feedback:
-
Tabs UI is not clear.
-
Using different colors for graphs may not be scalable and visually a bit intrusive.
v0.2
Feedback:
Almost there, but horizontal tabs may not be scalable when we introduce a new set of metrics, customer reports, and dashboards.
Final experience
Conversations, Users, Tags, and CSAT are the overview reports through which users can get high-level information on workload and performance.
Design challenges
1. Analytics module positioning
As Hiver is positioned inside the Gmail interface (USP of Hiver) I had to come up with a navigation system that shouldn't hamper the business' USP.
​
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Users shouldn't be redirected to the new windows.
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Users should be able to navigate to the other reports or metrics in the experience.
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Users can easily navigate to Gmail/Hiver product experience from Reports.
2. Hiver branding and Extensions compliances
As per chrome extension policy, Hiver cannot override Gmail's branding. At the same time, Hiver being a business needs to emphasize its identity too. Keeping this in mind, I kept Gmail's topbar intact and added the analytics module underneath it.
3. Navigation bar
We have ten metrics categorized into four groups for the initial release. Further, we'll have more metrics added to the reports. We wanted to provide the users with an intuitive and simple navigation system that is scalable when we introduce new metrics as well.
5. Date picker experience
Usability testing
I quickly validated my designs using the Userberry tool to create task-oriented prototypes. This allowed me to test both high-level flows and finer details. With assistance from my product partner, I set up calls with five analytics-focused customers, as well as members of our in-house support team, to gather feedback.
💙💙💙
"Loved the usability. Found it extremely easy to use."
"​Loved the user experience and found it extremely easy to navigate."
User pain point
"Would love to have an easier way to navigate between individual user reports."
User pain point
"It's not clear how the information is sorted on the table. Based on any indication I would sort the table and verify the data."
User pain point
" I can hardly see the background change when I hover on the table"
User pain point
“I don’t like that it defaults to the last 7 days. I would rather it return to previously selected time frame when I close and open the analytics tool”
Developer - Hand off
The majority of the developers in the team are freshers. They're not familiar with zeplin. So, I conducted a couple of workshops on zeplin usage and added the dev notes while handing off the screens.
Outcome
I was thrilled to work on this project because it brought real value to our customers and involved in-depth research and detailed interaction design. I learned a lot from collaborating with various teams and customers, with key takeaways that enhanced both product and business processes.
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Adoption of the analytics tool grew by 40% within the first three months of the launch.
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Over the past 6 months, 60% of our paying customers actively use the Analytics feature.
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Around 30 accounts have generated a total of 172 custom reports.