Vorboss' Locations App

Vorboss' sales teams struggled with prioritising which buildings to visit across London and collecting data during visits felt tedious. Identifying business within a building, key decisions-makers, or if we had existing customers in the building required a lot of time and effort.

To solve this, we introduced the Locations app to our commercial platform. The Locations app gives users quick access to valuable commercial data from both internal and external sources. It provides a mobile-friendly experience, making it easier for users to gather and update data on the go.

For the business, these insights could help increase the sales team's conversion rates, while a more efficient process means the team can be more productive.

To better understand the sales team's challenges, I conducted user interviews and joined one of their street walks to see their process firsthand. My goals were to identify features that could improve their workflow and determine what insights are valuable when prospecting.

How might we help sales teams identify and prioritise buildings around London?

Sales teams only had access to user-generated data. This was a slow, inefficient process of building a database of potential businesses around London. Key information, like if there were existing customers in a building wasn't easily accessible. Users had to search through various pages across the app which slowed them down.

How might we help sales teams efficiently gather data about the building?

Gathering data on-site was tedious. Without a mobile-friendly interface, users had to take notes during visits and manually enter them later on their laptops.

Ideation

I led a design workshop with the product team to share the research findings and problem statements. Using low-fidelity wireframes, I presented early ideas and we brainstormed features to address user pain points. Engineers also discussed external data sources like Companies House and Ordnance Survey, exploring ways to enrich our internal data and provide more valuable insights.

Wireframing & Prototyping

I quickly moved to high-fidelity wireframes, using components and design patterns from our design system where possible. During this process, I:

• Shared my designs early and often during standups to gather feedback and stay aligned with changes as the engineers explored the data.
• Took inspiration from familiar map view designs like Zoopla and Google Maps, using commonly used design patterns that our users would recognise.
• Worked closely with engineers to make sure the designs were feasible within the technical and time constraints.

Once the team and I were happy with the designs, I created a clickable prototype in Figma, ready for our user demo.

Testing & Iterating

Alongside the product manager, we demoed the new features to a group of users and gathered feedback. While all the users agreed the Locations app would speed up their workflows, they struggled to grasp new concepts we introduced like the differences between addresses, footprints or buildings as some of these data types didn’t exist in their current workflow.

To address this, we iterated again, replacing any technical jargon with simpler, more intuitive language. We also removed some of the new concepts that users struggled to grasp and weren't particularly helpful to know in their process.

Release & Impact

Although another round of testing would have been valuable, we were confident that the Locations app would deliver great value—especially with Sales Super Days around the corner.

We rolled out the new app, and the results were immediate:

• Sales teams could gather data much faster during on-site visits.
• They had quick access to valuable insights to use when speaking with prospects.
• The process became less tedious, making the sales teams much happier with their improved workflow.

Since we had a tight deadline, some UX improvements had to be sacrificed to ship the app on time. In the next iterations, we’ll focus on improving these areas. This is just the first version, and there’s plenty of room for improvement. Now that users use the app in their daily workflows, I’ll keep gathering feedback and uncovering new insights we might have missed during the demos.