How my team and I reduced texting time by 88%
Mango Voice
January - October 2022
Primary Role:
Product Designer (Research and Ui)
Summary
I was doing qualitative interviews with customers who showed me their work process. This led to Mango Snippets: A texting product that increased texting speed up to 88%*.
As of this writing, Mango's 3,000 customers have created 910 snippets since it launched 4 months prior, saving hours of time.
Final Results
Introducing Snippets: a software product that speeds up your texting time by 88%.
Keep reading to see how I arrived here:
Context
We just released a web app (Summer 2021) and I did weekly phone calls with beta customers. The purpose of the web app is to give dental offices the tools they need to communicate with their patients. The highest demand tool is by far texting from the business number.
"Your copy and paste sucks"
"We use a google document that has all of our texts that we repeatedly send to patients. I don't have time to text out the same thing over and over again; I copy the text from a google doc and paste it in. It's really annoying that the copy and paste doesn't work"
The receptionist was trying to speed up her work by copying and pasting templates from a Google Doc, but the copy and paste wasn't working—and this is where I discovered these two opportunities:
We should really get the copy and paste working, but more importantly
If one customer was going way out of their way to speed up texting, they probably weren't alone.
Digging Deeper
Key Learnings:
We knew who our top texting offices were, so the next step was to reach out to them! As I reached out to each of these offices I learned the following:
Some offices were in fact using a note or doc app to try and "templatize" their texts
Some offices were just painfully rewriting the same texts over and over and were tenaciously enthusiastic about us helping them speed up texting.
We saw that other tools (like Podium) were really advanced with smart labels that would automatically replace "@customer" with their name, or "@location" with your practice name.. we needed a simpler version but were really excited to see that other software brands were doing this.
Goals for this project
The overall goal (image above) was to build a product that helped front desk teams communicate with their patients (customers) which would in turn increase profits for a dentist.
Sketching out the foundation
Wireframing and Designing
I began sketching out what I thought could work for our first version of Snippets (yup—I totally copied the name from Etsy).
Wireframe Explainer
This crappy wireframe I did (above) is a modal where a user can create, read, update, or delete their text template (Snippets).
This is the first version of the snippets product. You're looking at the settings screen, and the user is on the texting tab, where they can look at and manage their snippets. (CRUD).
Introducing Crappy 1.0
I worked closely with our development team to build this snippet product. Mango builds things in the lean outcome product development spirit. We released a really simple version of snippets—and immediately began getting feedback from customers.
Feedback we received:
I continued to follow up with our beta customers with this new snippets product via texting and phone calls. I received feedback on the following subjects:
Bugs we didn't catch—we introduced some bad UX and needed to fix that
Character limit confusion
Unsupported characters (receptionists wanting to use emojis but couldn't)
Results (after releasing version 2)
This was written in October 2022. This data is outdated now.
The product today is used strongly by our power users who understand it—it still needs a lot of work (see section below). As of Fall 2022 our 3,500(ish) customers have created 941 snippets.
We went back to the board and retweaked the Ui to fix the UX bugs, and I worked closely with the developers to refine some of the code issues (like character limits).
You can see between the two version that I also tweaked the overall branding—we went through a rebrand so I made those changes in the Ui and code too.
Why was this a problem in the first place?
Receptionists that are tech savvy can bust out an appointment reminder text in 1.5 minutes, someone that is less confident with technology.. well, somewhere between 3 and 5 minutes.
Now imagine your workflow is reminding everyone of upcoming appointments for the next day and customers within the next week. That time really adds up!
Then, if someone cancels, you need to send out texts as fast as possible to fill that open spot. If it takes you 3 minutes to send a single text, and you need to text 15 people, that’s 45 minutes spent texting the same thing over and over again.
Next Steps
Where we were going when I left Mango in October 2022
As of today our snippets are an exciting feature for customers. Unfortunately the empty state for a new office that joins Mango is really confusing.
Funnel Story:
We looked at our analytics and saw an interesting drop off between users who clicked on the snippet Icon to send a snippet.. and those who finished through the process.
You can see a 50% drop off (which is not good). My theory for this:
The empty state for a new office doesn't have any learning wizard, which means a new office doesn't have any education on how to use the stuff in the app.
More Research
I asked the development team to get me the entire snippet content for all our customers, and I began reading through each one and categorizing them by topic
I noticed trends (it turns out that almost every dental practice sends the same type of text). Here we are thinking we're all so unique, when it's not quite like that.
My Next Steps
If I were still at Mango, I would create some predefined snippet examples preloaded into every users app, based off big categories:
Appointment Reminder example
Update on status example
Greeting a new patient example
Marketing (usually to fill an open spot in the schedule or to remind them that they're do for a teeth cleaning/checkup).
Asking patients to leave a review
Learning
This was written in October 2022. This data is outdated now.
I learned the power of close collaboration:
There were so many times where I'd be on a call for hours with my developers as we were making changes on the fly based off my knowledge of the customer and their expertise in the code. It felt amazing to watch changes going out by the hour!
Being really close to your customer pays off:
I'm so grateful that I had the opportunity to talk over the phone and text daily with customers, because I knew exactly what they wanted and what they hated. I could speak up for them and help drive the product forward faster than if I were just guessing.
How does this impact you going forward?
This makes me really want to lean on data for all my future projects! I felt like making any decision was so easy because I had so much data to rely on (both qualitative and quantitative).
Going forward I want to incorporate data and close contact with my team and customers on all my software endeavours!
