Head of Design for Groundbreaking Enterprise AI SaaS Product
Recruited for VP of Design (2016-2019) for a groundbreaking B2B SaaS company in the Enterprise Service Management space.
Designed and launched an extremely well-received MVP in 9 months, ultimately leading to a successful 30M Series B round. Established consumer-facing branding, marketing, chatbot personality, and a myriad of innovative product features.
Espressive has continued to garner significant industry praise, market traction, and several awards from Gartner & others.
Process involved: competitive analysis and market research; rapid ideation, prototyping, testing and evaluation of core MVP features using an agile framework; working hand-in-hand with engineering to get features built and shipped, ensuring subsequent issues adequately addressed with CX team; hiring, leadership & growth of core design team; helping create a positive and healthy company culture, making Espressive an exceptional place to work every day.
Early stage startup companies are often founded when a hole in an existing market is discovered.
The founders of Espressive had spent considerable time at ServiceNow, a well known enterprise company that had dominated the market, but was leaving its customers underwhelmed, and end users frustrated. ServiceNow was more known at that time for being a monopoly than for truly great end to end user experiences that actually provided the help that employees and help desk workers desperately needed. Another way to put it is that ServiceNow provided technology framework, not user experience. That part was left to the enterprise, specifically the IT helpdesk, to solve.
Ramping Up
Once we had a baseline infrastructure and a fully staffed team, it was time to rock, full steam ahead. We needed to start building the product, and our schedule and timeline were aggressive.
This involved:
-Collaborating cross-functionally in rapid design sprints to specify & design major features.
-Building approved concepts into Proto.IO prototypes, for testing in the field with prospective customers.
-In parallel, designing the consumer-facing branding and marketing for Espressive’s launch.
-Building core MVP features with Eng. team.
The Espressive Design System for Mobile & Web
As Espressive’s design progressed, a framework was built to codify the differences in layout and interaction models between mobile and web, in order to support and evolve a design system of scalable repeatable patterns across both domains.
Branding
There were two very separate and different considerations in branding Espressive that made it slightly more involved than what might otherwise be just another corporate logo. The obvious need to brand the company itself was made slightly more complicated by its relationship to the enterprise customer.
Using Service Now as the model, it was an accepted reality that enterprise customers would want to own—or “skin”, the branding of Espressive, once deployed in the corporate environment. The open question was whether or not Espressive could really be branded at all under those constraints. It seemed a given that Espressive would be a white label product. But if our core differentiator was providing a best-in-class user experiences, wouldn’t we be throwing away that investment if there wasn’t a way for us to visibly associate with those core experiences in the mind of the end user?
I felt it was imperative to find a way to claim ownership over what we were doing. You don’t invest hundreds of hours innovating unique user experiences, and not brand them so that users know who is responsible. How might we convey and imprint our unique value proposition in such an environment?
Around this time I got a ping over Slack from our CEO. It read: Any progress on the logo?
I had been so busy with architecting features and flows, that I hadn’t had a moment to focus on the brand side of things. I began carving out a design brief focused on clarifying in words what a solid brand should accomplish for us, so we’d have something to map the work to.
Espressive had two very different audience segments for its brand. Our primary paying customer is the IT/HR “buyer” whom we needed to speak directly to and gain trust with. Our primary user (and enthusiastic evangelist hopeful) was the enterprise employee.
Branding: Core Objectives
Create a differentiated, unique and memorable consumer-facing brand for Espressive that stands out in the B to B landscape as customer-focused, consumer-friendly, conveying the personable service-oriented nature of our product offering.
Strategies
-Develop an emoji-centric chatbot character to personify the brand values of Espressive: Personable, Witty, Intelligent, and Helpful. Use the universally understood metaphor of the barista and coffee to convey high-touch human service and productivity in work culture.
-Create adaptive versions of Barista to maintain brand recognition across in-app and marketing touchpoints, highlighting different aspects of the character depending on the context.
-Provide a solution that eloquently balances the need for corporations to brand their enterprise applications, without subsuming or eliminating the opportunity for Espressive to be known to the end user from within the application environment.
Co-Branding: Barista maintains the brand expression for Espressive, while wearing the primary colors of the enterprise.
The full icon SVG set for the Espressive App, dynamically skinned in corporate brand colors.
The Star of Espressive: Barista! In-App vs. Marketing personas. Can you tell the difference?
Hint: The Coffee Cup makes better sense inside the application experience, when you’re interacting with Barista. Outside the app, the brand functions more succinctly without the (potentially confusing) coffee metaphor.
Espressive Collateral
Espressive Website 1.0
Espressive App Navigation
How-To Trainer Flow
