Time
3 months
Role
Product Designer
Processes
User Research
Wireframing
Prototyping
User Testing
Cross-Functional Teamwork
Collaborators
1 Product Designer
1 UX Researcher
5 Engineers
2 Product Managers
The Problem
Exploring company hierarchies and adding companies to reports is difficult to navigate and use.
LinkedIn Sales Insights provides sales operations professionals access to LinkedIn data and insights, giving them the tools they need to more efficiently conduct their work and guide the sales team in the right direction. One of the tools they use is the report builder, where they can view company hierarchies and add parent and subsidiary companies.
However, the current hierarchies feature is difficult to find, and once opened is limited in capabilities.
Project Context
What is Sales Insights?
Sales Insights is one of the two products within LinkedIn Sales Solutions.
They work together to translate data into dynamic insights that empower organizations to identify, research, and prioritize the accounts to act on.
User Research
Who is a Sales Insights user?
User Research
What are her goals?
Preliminary Research
What is the current process like?
The hierarchy flow starts in a company report. Sophie has already used the filter panel to narrow in on the companies she's interested in viewing.
If Sophie is interested in viewing a company's hierarchy she has to click into a company's information to access the entry point.
Companies without hierarchy data don't have this button available.
A modal then opens up with a list of parent and subsidiary companies.
If Sophie wants to add a company to her report she has to make changes to her filter criteria or create a new report.
Opportunities
What should we focus on?
The Solution
A more dynamic hierarchies feature with new icons and flexibility when adding and removing companies.
After meeting with stakeholderes and going through user research findings I used lo-fidelity mockups to explore solutions.
This project in particular involved working very closely with the backend engineering team to understand our capabilities and how the data is organized, as well as frequent meetings with my PM to make sure we were heading in the right direction.
Final Product
Exploring a company's hierarchy and adding companies to a report
Thanks to a new icon Sophie can easily spot the companies with a hierarchy.
Within the modal, she can select individual companies to add or add them all at once, and save to update her report.
Companies that have been manually added outside of her filter criteria are highlighted in blue, and she can easily access them in the filter panel.
Removing companies using the modal
To remove companies from a report she can go back into a company's hierarchy and unselect subsidiaries she wishes to remove.
Removing companies using the sources panel
She can also go directly into the sources section of a report to view any manually added companies and remove them.
Final Product
How does this solve our user problems?
The Process
How I came to these solutions and a snapshot of the experience.
This process involved three larger challenges: how to display hierarchies in the report view, how to handle filter discrepancies when adding companies outside the criteria, and how to visually communicate these relationships. Each of these needed to be explored on my own and with other designers, discussed among stakeholders, and brought to engineering to make sure the ideas were in scope.
After 12 Figma prototype iterations and numerous cross-functional meetings we reached a solution the team feels proud of. The following are some highlights from the journey.
The Process
Design Challenge 1: Information Architecture
Design Challenge 2: Filter Discrepancies
Design Challenge 3: Visual Cues
Conclusion
Learnings and next steps
The hierarchies feature is currently in production in Sales Insights, and the hierarchy icon is live and is being used across all LinkedIn products.
One thing I learned is the importance of being a driving force behind the feature. This was a large-scale, cross-functional project that spanned a few months, and with teammates and teams being pulled in so many directions it can be challenging for everyone to stay on track. I took the initiative of reaching out to my PMs and setting up recurring meetings with the engineering team to make sure we stayed in scope, we finished on time, and that any and all design questions were answered.
It was also a good exercise in practicing both high-level design work and getting in the weeds with smaller UI changes. For example in a given day I could be working with the backend engineering team to understand how we structure reports and group records, while also working with the LinkedIn design systems team to create icons. This flexibility is useful for all kinds of projects.