Projects
Plan Builder
The complete tool to manage your sales compensation plans
Projects
Plan Builder
The complete tool to manage your sales compensation plans
Projects
Plan Builder
The complete tool to manage your sales compensation plans
Projects
Plan Builder
The complete tool to manage your sales compensation plans
year
2023
timeframe
4 weeks
tool
Figma
category
New Feature
To truly revolutionize sales compensation, Forma.ai introduced Plan Builder to automate the end-to-end process for setting up, configuring, and assigning sales compensation with flexibility at scale. Most importantly, it is the complete tool that provides clarity for management and sales reps regarding sales compensation and optimizing revenue growth for companies.
Objective
The product development organization aims to reduce engineering resources for daily customer operations by 80% by the end of 2023
Problem
Currently, sales compensation plans are hard coded into the application. It offers no visibility and configurability for end users such as the Customer Operation team and Sales Admins.
It is costly to have engineering to be involved every time sales compensation plans need to be modified or assigned to sales rep.
Goal
A successful Plan Builder will be able to allow Customer Operations and/or Comp Admins to build/modify comp plans and assign plans to sales reps.
Understand
To build a solution around this problem that we're trying to solve, my PM and I went through a couple of things:
why Plan Builder was important to our clients and business
what makes up a sales compensation plan
what data input is required in the UI
Essentially, Plan Builder is an editor that creates a form template of sales compensation plan. Each template can be lightly modified and assigned to a single or multiple sales rep(s).
Upon having a better understanding of Plan Builder, I also had multiple 1 on 1s with my design manager to discuss design concepts.
My Role
In collaboration with my PM and design manager, we repolished the end to end user flow from a user creates a plan to assigning it to a sales rep.
As one of the two designers on the project, my primary focus was the UX around data input portion of the user flow, step 1 -7
The rest of the user flow were mainly recycling existing design patterns from another feature “Form Builder” in the application.
Design Problem
Once I had a good grasp of Plan Builder both in the business and design context, I focused on the following problems:
Each compensation plan consists of multiple metrics. What is the best way to display metrics when there are over 10 of them?
What improvements can be made to the plan builder UX?
How to create a more intuitive UX for adding columns and rows?
Research
First step was to conduct research on how existing forms and/or any data input products behave.
This allowed me to observe any design patterns that other applications are utilizing and also evaluating our design concepts and existing design patterns.
Ideation
Components Card
While recycling the existing UI from Form Builder and considering that there could be up to 10 components in a comp plan, it was hard to identify the selected card and selected fields. Below is an example of the initial design exploration.
Table Input Field
Adding a table was a new form field we had to introduce for Plan Builder. The idea was not to replicate Excel, but a simple UI allowing users to add columns and rows to input data in a tabular format and calculating simple math.
Before & After
User Testing
While the UI was adjusted based on the requirements of Plan Builder, we had to validate our designs and ensure UX made sense to the users.
I created the prototype and took notes for the user testing session. My design manager was the facilitator for the user testing sessions.
Since Plan Builder was a brand new concept to the Customer Operations who would be one of the end users, our user testing focused on:
Intuitiveness - is each step intuitive and easily understandable?
Efficiency - how quickly can a user build a comp plan?
We tested with 6 different Customer Operations members who support different clients.
Key Findings
With our affinity map, we were able to identify a few key findings:
Better naming convention
Users were unclear about what “additional fields”, “component card”
Calculation validation
Users questioned about the validation of variables and formula.
Additional input is required
Users questioned about the visibility of other important data that is usually put in a comp plan.
Results
After sharing key findings from the user testing sessions with our PM, the design team was later informed that the project had to be put on pause for rescoping.
A major reason for the rescoping was not due to the designs, but that the senior leadership team realized the current state of Plan Builder was too complex for what it’s meant to accomplish and would also require too much engineering effort.
Takeaways
Despite the project had to be on pause for rescoping, I very much enjoyed the end to end process of from understanding a big and complex problem to creating/improving designs to produce great UX.
The end to end process created an opportunity for me to take a deep dive into the existing design patterns and make recommendations for improvement while ensuring the UX/UI maintains a familiarity to our users.
User testing and prototyping are a form of storytelling, so it was crucial to have a well-written user testing document. While I initially created the prototype, my manager added more screen interaction to better illustrate her approach in facilitating the user testing session.
Project Resumes
After a few weeks of hiatus, I was back in action to iterate on the existing designs in about 1-week time.
Fortunately, the designs were in a good state and it was up to engineering to implement them. Plan builder was introduced to a few client instances. Unfortunately, the company had to go through restructure due to the economic downturns so I was unable to witness the future success of the feature. However, the brith of Plan Builder certainly would contribute to the reduction of engineering resources for daily operations by at the minimum 20%.
year
2023
timeframe
4 weeks
tool
Figma
category
New Feature
To truly revolutionize sales compensation, Forma.ai introduced Plan Builder to automate the end-to-end process for setting up, configuring, and assigning sales compensation with flexibility at scale. Most importantly, it is the complete tool that provides clarity for management and sales reps regarding sales compensation and optimizing revenue growth for companies.
Objective
The product development organization aims to reduce engineering resources for daily customer operations by 80% by the end of 2023
Problem
Currently, sales compensation plans are hard coded into the application. It offers no visibility and configurability for end users such as the Customer Operation team and Sales Admins.
It is costly to have engineering to be involved every time sales compensation plans need to be modified or assigned to sales rep.
Goal
A successful Plan Builder will be able to allow Customer Operations and/or Comp Admins to build/modify comp plans and assign plans to sales reps.
Understand
To build a solution around this problem that we're trying to solve, my PM and I went through a couple of things:
why Plan Builder was important to our clients and business
what makes up a sales compensation plan
what data input is required in the UI
Essentially, Plan Builder is an editor that creates a form template of sales compensation plan. Each template can be lightly modified and assigned to a single or multiple sales rep(s).
Upon having a better understanding of Plan Builder, I also had multiple 1 on 1s with my design manager to discuss design concepts.
My Role
In collaboration with my PM and design manager, we repolished the end to end user flow from a user creates a plan to assigning it to a sales rep.
As one of the two designers on the project, my primary focus was the UX around data input portion of the user flow, step 1 -7
The rest of the user flow were mainly recycling existing design patterns from another feature “Form Builder” in the application.
Design Problem
Once I had a good grasp of Plan Builder both in the business and design context, I focused on the following problems:
Each compensation plan consists of multiple metrics. What is the best way to display metrics when there are over 10 of them?
What improvements can be made to the plan builder UX?
How to create a more intuitive UX for adding columns and rows?
Research
First step was to conduct research on how existing forms and/or any data input products behave.
This allowed me to observe any design patterns that other applications are utilizing and also evaluating our design concepts and existing design patterns.
Ideation
Components Card
While recycling the existing UI from Form Builder and considering that there could be up to 10 components in a comp plan, it was hard to identify the selected card and selected fields. Below is an example of the initial design exploration.
Table Input Field
Adding a table was a new form field we had to introduce for Plan Builder. The idea was not to replicate Excel, but a simple UI allowing users to add columns and rows to input data in a tabular format and calculating simple math.
Before & After
User Testing
While the UI was adjusted based on the requirements of Plan Builder, we had to validate our designs and ensure UX made sense to the users.
I created the prototype and took notes for the user testing session. My design manager was the facilitator for the user testing sessions.
Since Plan Builder was a brand new concept to the Customer Operations who would be one of the end users, our user testing focused on:
Intuitiveness - is each step intuitive and easily understandable?
Efficiency - how quickly can a user build a comp plan?
We tested with 6 different Customer Operations members who support different clients.
Key Findings
With our affinity map, we were able to identify a few key findings:
Better naming convention
Users were unclear about what “additional fields”, “component card”
Calculation validation
Users questioned about the validation of variables and formula.
Additional input is required
Users questioned about the visibility of other important data that is usually put in a comp plan.
Results
After sharing key findings from the user testing sessions with our PM, the design team was later informed that the project had to be put on pause for rescoping.
A major reason for the rescoping was not due to the designs, but that the senior leadership team realized the current state of Plan Builder was too complex for what it’s meant to accomplish and would also require too much engineering effort.
Takeaways
Despite the project had to be on pause for rescoping, I very much enjoyed the end to end process of from understanding a big and complex problem to creating/improving designs to produce great UX.
The end to end process created an opportunity for me to take a deep dive into the existing design patterns and make recommendations for improvement while ensuring the UX/UI maintains a familiarity to our users.
User testing and prototyping are a form of storytelling, so it was crucial to have a well-written user testing document. While I initially created the prototype, my manager added more screen interaction to better illustrate her approach in facilitating the user testing session.
Project Resumes
After a few weeks of hiatus, I was back in action to iterate on the existing designs in about 1-week time.
Fortunately, the designs were in a good state and it was up to engineering to implement them. Plan builder was introduced to a few client instances. Unfortunately, the company had to go through restructure due to the economic downturns so I was unable to witness the future success of the feature. However, the brith of Plan Builder certainly would contribute to the reduction of engineering resources for daily operations by at the minimum 20%.
year
2023
timeframe
4 weeks
tool
Figma
category
New Feature
To truly revolutionize sales compensation, Forma.ai introduced Plan Builder to automate the end-to-end process for setting up, configuring, and assigning sales compensation with flexibility at scale. Most importantly, it is the complete tool that provides clarity for management and sales reps regarding sales compensation and optimizing revenue growth for companies.
Objective
The product development organization aims to reduce engineering resources for daily customer operations by 80% by the end of 2023
Problem
Currently, sales compensation plans are hard coded into the application. It offers no visibility and configurability for end users such as the Customer Operation team and Sales Admins.
It is costly to have engineering to be involved every time sales compensation plans need to be modified or assigned to sales rep.
Goal
A successful Plan Builder will be able to allow Customer Operations and/or Comp Admins to build/modify comp plans and assign plans to sales reps.
Understand
To build a solution around this problem that we're trying to solve, my PM and I went through a couple of things:
why Plan Builder was important to our clients and business
what makes up a sales compensation plan
what data input is required in the UI
Essentially, Plan Builder is an editor that creates a form template of sales compensation plan. Each template can be lightly modified and assigned to a single or multiple sales rep(s).
Upon having a better understanding of Plan Builder, I also had multiple 1 on 1s with my design manager to discuss design concepts.
My Role
In collaboration with my PM and design manager, we repolished the end to end user flow from a user creates a plan to assigning it to a sales rep.
As one of the two designers on the project, my primary focus was the UX around data input portion of the user flow, step 1 -7
The rest of the user flow were mainly recycling existing design patterns from another feature “Form Builder” in the application.
Design Problem
Once I had a good grasp of Plan Builder both in the business and design context, I focused on the following problems:
Each compensation plan consists of multiple metrics. What is the best way to display metrics when there are over 10 of them?
What improvements can be made to the plan builder UX?
How to create a more intuitive UX for adding columns and rows?
Research
First step was to conduct research on how existing forms and/or any data input products behave.
This allowed me to observe any design patterns that other applications are utilizing and also evaluating our design concepts and existing design patterns.
Ideation
Components Card
While recycling the existing UI from Form Builder and considering that there could be up to 10 components in a comp plan, it was hard to identify the selected card and selected fields. Below is an example of the initial design exploration.
Table Input Field
Adding a table was a new form field we had to introduce for Plan Builder. The idea was not to replicate Excel, but a simple UI allowing users to add columns and rows to input data in a tabular format and calculating simple math.
Before & After
User Testing
While the UI was adjusted based on the requirements of Plan Builder, we had to validate our designs and ensure UX made sense to the users.
I created the prototype and took notes for the user testing session. My design manager was the facilitator for the user testing sessions.
Since Plan Builder was a brand new concept to the Customer Operations who would be one of the end users, our user testing focused on:
Intuitiveness - is each step intuitive and easily understandable?
Efficiency - how quickly can a user build a comp plan?
We tested with 6 different Customer Operations members who support different clients.
Key Findings
With our affinity map, we were able to identify a few key findings:
Better naming convention
Users were unclear about what “additional fields”, “component card”
Calculation validation
Users questioned about the validation of variables and formula.
Additional input is required
Users questioned about the visibility of other important data that is usually put in a comp plan.
Results
After sharing key findings from the user testing sessions with our PM, the design team was later informed that the project had to be put on pause for rescoping.
A major reason for the rescoping was not due to the designs, but that the senior leadership team realized the current state of Plan Builder was too complex for what it’s meant to accomplish and would also require too much engineering effort.
Takeaways
Despite the project had to be on pause for rescoping, I very much enjoyed the end to end process of from understanding a big and complex problem to creating/improving designs to produce great UX.
The end to end process created an opportunity for me to take a deep dive into the existing design patterns and make recommendations for improvement while ensuring the UX/UI maintains a familiarity to our users.
User testing and prototyping are a form of storytelling, so it was crucial to have a well-written user testing document. While I initially created the prototype, my manager added more screen interaction to better illustrate her approach in facilitating the user testing session.
Project Resumes
After a few weeks of hiatus, I was back in action to iterate on the existing designs in about 1-week time.
Fortunately, the designs were in a good state and it was up to engineering to implement them. Plan builder was introduced to a few client instances. Unfortunately, the company had to go through restructure due to the economic downturns so I was unable to witness the future success of the feature. However, the brith of Plan Builder certainly would contribute to the reduction of engineering resources for daily operations by at the minimum 20%.
year
2023
timeframe
4 weeks
tool
Figma
category
New Feature
To truly revolutionize sales compensation, Forma.ai introduced Plan Builder to automate the end-to-end process for setting up, configuring, and assigning sales compensation with flexibility at scale. Most importantly, it is the complete tool that provides clarity for management and sales reps regarding sales compensation and optimizing revenue growth for companies.
Objective
The product development organization aims to reduce engineering resources for daily customer operations by 80% by the end of 2023
Problem
Currently, sales compensation plans are hard coded into the application. It offers no visibility and configurability for end users such as the Customer Operation team and Sales Admins.
It is costly to have engineering to be involved every time sales compensation plans need to be modified or assigned to sales rep.
Goal
A successful Plan Builder will be able to allow Customer Operations and/or Comp Admins to build/modify comp plans and assign plans to sales reps.
Understand
To build a solution around this problem that we're trying to solve, my PM and I went through a couple of things:
why Plan Builder was important to our clients and business
what makes up a sales compensation plan
what data input is required in the UI
Essentially, Plan Builder is an editor that creates a form template of sales compensation plan. Each template can be lightly modified and assigned to a single or multiple sales rep(s).
Upon having a better understanding of Plan Builder, I also had multiple 1 on 1s with my design manager to discuss design concepts.
My Role
In collaboration with my PM and design manager, we repolished the end to end user flow from a user creates a plan to assigning it to a sales rep.
As one of the two designers on the project, my primary focus was the UX around data input portion of the user flow, step 1 -7
The rest of the user flow were mainly recycling existing design patterns from another feature “Form Builder” in the application.
Design Problem
Once I had a good grasp of Plan Builder both in the business and design context, I focused on the following problems:
Each compensation plan consists of multiple metrics. What is the best way to display metrics when there are over 10 of them?
What improvements can be made to the plan builder UX?
How to create a more intuitive UX for adding columns and rows?
Research
First step was to conduct research on how existing forms and/or any data input products behave.
This allowed me to observe any design patterns that other applications are utilizing and also evaluating our design concepts and existing design patterns.
Ideation
Components Card
While recycling the existing UI from Form Builder and considering that there could be up to 10 components in a comp plan, it was hard to identify the selected card and selected fields. Below is an example of the initial design exploration.
Table Input Field
Adding a table was a new form field we had to introduce for Plan Builder. The idea was not to replicate Excel, but a simple UI allowing users to add columns and rows to input data in a tabular format and calculating simple math.
Before & After
User Testing
While the UI was adjusted based on the requirements of Plan Builder, we had to validate our designs and ensure UX made sense to the users.
I created the prototype and took notes for the user testing session. My design manager was the facilitator for the user testing sessions.
Since Plan Builder was a brand new concept to the Customer Operations who would be one of the end users, our user testing focused on:
Intuitiveness - is each step intuitive and easily understandable?
Efficiency - how quickly can a user build a comp plan?
We tested with 6 different Customer Operations members who support different clients.
Key Findings
With our affinity map, we were able to identify a few key findings:
Better naming convention
Users were unclear about what “additional fields”, “component card”
Calculation validation
Users questioned about the validation of variables and formula.
Additional input is required
Users questioned about the visibility of other important data that is usually put in a comp plan.
Results
After sharing key findings from the user testing sessions with our PM, the design team was later informed that the project had to be put on pause for rescoping.
A major reason for the rescoping was not due to the designs, but that the senior leadership team realized the current state of Plan Builder was too complex for what it’s meant to accomplish and would also require too much engineering effort.
Takeaways
Despite the project had to be on pause for rescoping, I very much enjoyed the end to end process of from understanding a big and complex problem to creating/improving designs to produce great UX.
The end to end process created an opportunity for me to take a deep dive into the existing design patterns and make recommendations for improvement while ensuring the UX/UI maintains a familiarity to our users.
User testing and prototyping are a form of storytelling, so it was crucial to have a well-written user testing document. While I initially created the prototype, my manager added more screen interaction to better illustrate her approach in facilitating the user testing session.
Project Resumes
After a few weeks of hiatus, I was back in action to iterate on the existing designs in about 1-week time.
Fortunately, the designs were in a good state and it was up to engineering to implement them. Plan builder was introduced to a few client instances. Unfortunately, the company had to go through restructure due to the economic downturns so I was unable to witness the future success of the feature. However, the brith of Plan Builder certainly would contribute to the reduction of engineering resources for daily operations by at the minimum 20%.
