case study
Enabling Optoro employees by building trust and a delightful user experience
Optoro worked with an agency to execute a rebrand in 2016 which provided them with brand guidelines and a presentation template. Unfortunately, the brand guidelines were too complex for a non-designer to understand (let alone use) and the presentation template only had 5 basic slide designs. As a result, Optoro’s external sales materials were hard to understand, lacked a clear narrative, had disjointed visuals, and were difficult and tedious to build.
Having presentations that looked unrefined didn’t become a problem until 2018 when Optoro shifted its positioning from warehouse operations to software and technology. New strategies and messaging were employed to effectively pitch to new prospects, and the expectation was that communication materials would be polished and clear.
When I joined in 2019, it was clear that there was a huge opportunity to educate, build advocacy, and shepherd in a new era of consistency and visual storytelling.
Based on all of this, my mission was threefold:
Build a user-friendly resource library
Create assets and templates that were usable and accessible to the entire company
Build trust, advocacy, and empathy with critical stakeholders by strategically involving them in / educating them through the process
the before
my role
I partnered with one junior designer for the initial stages of this project but executed the majority of the work on my own.
creative direction
user testing
design execution
training
interviews
My team and I interviewed 15 power users and leadership from our client-facing teams to understand how they build slides, what their process looks like, how they collaborate with others, what they felt was missing, and what they like about the existing assets available to them.
Their feedback was critical to help determine how to move forward with the design and build of the templates and asset library.
slide template design and testing
I began designing the new Google Slides template to address the most critical use cases based on the aforementioned user feedback and design explorations that were happening concurrently as we were refreshing the overall brand.
When the template was in a good place, I led usability tests with our original power users — allowing them to test-drive the template and provide feedback on the design, usability, and workflow optimization, which I then used to finalize the template for company-wide release.
When all was said and done, the completed template included 36 slide templates and 18 pre-designed graphics templates that could be edited for easy use. Since completing the template refresh, I’ve also built a library of standard slides (messaging & design) with our product marketing team.
resource library development
One of the most surprising (and horrifying, if I’m being honest) discoveries I made during the interview and testing process was that our users were
screenshotting things from the website to add to decks
Google image searching for icons and images
Copy-and-pasting everything from previous slide decks
To address all of this, I developed a company-wide resource library to make all of the brand assets easily accessible. In the absence of a DAM system, this was built in a shared Google Drive. Many of the assets folks needed existed already, they just needed to be made available.
In addition to folders of all of the individual components, I created an “Icons and Graphics” deck which houses our icons, illustrations, logos, and tech images so that they can easily be copy-and-pasted into presentations — which has become one of the most accessed documents in the entire company.
launch & training
The refreshed brand, Resource Library, and Google Slide theme were announced in July of 2020 — over the course of the next 8 weeks, I hosted 6 company-wide training sessions over Zoom. Each session covered the updates to the Optoro brand, the features of the new template, workflows for effective content creation using the different tools and libraries, design best practices, and general tips and tricks for using Google Slides.
ongoing support
To support the launch of these updates, I hosted weekly Brand Office Hours via Zoom that anyone at the company could join to get live help. Additionally, I created (and still manage) a dedicated Slack channel for folks to provide feedback, ask questions, and get support.
outcomes
100% adoption of the new templates and brand elements within 4 months, resulting in consistent content, decreased production time, and increased scalability.
Reduced custom presentation design from an average of 6 hours to an average of 1 hour.
Overall reduction in the length of the sales cycle.
lessons learned
Form Follows Function
Understanding the full process of how users create external presentations and documents was critical for building a complete enablement ecosystem to address the company’s needs and move the brand forward. Knowing how users worked, like copy-and-pasting content from old files, helped me build tools for them that would mirror existing workflows, which would increase adoption. My deep understanding of their needs, processes, and storytelling have set the client-facing teams up for success and positioned me as someone people ask to work with.
Offer Consistent Support
In addition to creating the right things, I learned that it was critical to continue to offer support. I’m a one woman brand design show and cannot support all of the content creation at the company. However, through this process and in the years after, the trust and advocacy I built has created countless opportunities to educate, support, and empower Optoro associates through shadowing, trainings, and more.