2021
UX Research
Design Facillitation
UI Design
Design Sprint facilitation
Interviewing
Synthesis
Collaboration
Prototyping
Miro
Figma
Google Analytics
HotJar
MarvelApp
Unchained Robotics was founded in 2019 with a mission to simplify and accelerate industrial automation.
I joined Unchained Robotics mid 2020 as the sole designer in the 5-person core team. When I was first recruited, one of the co-founders told me that the team members have many different & conflicting ideas for where the direction of the company could be taken. They were also having trouble to kick-start the initiative judging by the endless meetings they were having.
From my past experience, I know that a Design Sprint workshop would solve this problem since it can align everyone on the vision, prioritize on the most pressing customer’s needs and replace endless meetings with tangible results that can be tested out with real target customers. Therefore, I proposed a 3-day Design Sprint workshop with everyone in the company (2 co-founders, 1 sales engineer, and 2 marketing staff). I asked every attendee to free up their schedule for 3 days, so that they can focus on solving this challenge.
We came up with the idea of a Marketplace that shows transparent prices and provides various robots & components under one roof. We also provide the Configurator, where we simplify the complex algorithm behind automation solutioning into interactive questions that capture customer’s requirements and propose the right robot, gripper and camera for them.
Before the design sprint workshop, I’ve interviewed 2 existing customers and conducted a survey to identify pain points, frustrations, needs, and desires with existing automation customer journey and determine how Unchained could improve this experience.
From this interview, I came up with the basic user journey map which would be a starting point for the workshop.
The survey was sent out parallelly with the interviews. The purpose is to reach out bigger audience. Eventually, it was filled out by 10 companies who already have implemented automation solution for some of their processes.
of customers are unsatisfied of the automation level in their company
the average time customers are willing to spend to gather requirement for a new project.
was the #1 most important information customers are looking for online, followed by use cases, datasheets, and types of services offered.
Eventhough the technology in the automation industry is world-class, the customer experience is still very complicated. Customers are not satisfied with the way they are finding robotics solutions for their factory. While there are many integrators offering automation services, they are all tied to only sell one particular robot brands and therefore, rarely provides an integrated solution that is unbiased and cost-effective. Even more complicated, the prices of these robots are not shared with the public, so customers often spend weeks emailing multiple integrators and OEMs back & forth just to find the right robots.
They can expect up to 12 months between first contact with automation integrators to having a fully functioning robot in their factory.
A set of user personas was built based on the interview insights to help drive decision making and keep the product focused on solving users pain points, frustrations, and goals.
Customers can expect up to 12 months between first contact with automation integrators to having a fully functioning robot in their factory.
To kick off the sprint, I let the participants look at the map I created. Then everyone was given a chance to put a dot sticker on the parts that they think was incorrect/irrelevant & need to be changed. We made changes together and eventually finalized the journey map.
After I presented the survey results, and did a quick cost-benefit analysis, another round of dot voting was conducted to decide which phase we should prioritize on solving first. We decided on the Customer Acquisition, Identification and Automation Design phases.
After deciding on the map, I interviewed the current sales engineer about the challenges he currently has during those 3 phases and what he thinks could make the experience better.
The participants were asked to take notes of this interview with a how-might-we format to reframe challenges as opportunities.
We narrowed down the scope with dot voting of the HMW notes from the interview we conducted with the sales engineer. Eventually, we came up with the Long-Term Goal & Sprint Questions.
Can we increase customers' awareness about automation possibilities & capabilities of different integrators?
Can we validate that partners find us to be beneficial to their sales cycle?
Can we present the available information in a way that is not overwhelming (also to non-technical people)?
Can we support non-technical people in their design process so they get what they want?
The original Lightning Demo exercise was supposed to be a 15 minute exercise. I’ve modified it by turning it into a ‘homework’ so that the participants can take a deeper look at the demos and get a warm up before the Sketch/Ideation exercise. Before the end of Day 1, I’ve prepared a board containing pre-recorded Loom videos/screenshot of products that I think solve some of the challenges. I also found from other industries because inspiration comes from unexpected places. The participants had the evening of day 1 & 1 hour in the morning of day 2 to browse them & fill out more on the board.
We took inspiration from travel, to mattress website, from car to sun shade protection configurators.
The 4-part concept sketching that followed consists of notetaking, doodling, crazy 8s and solution concept. Since I ran the workshop remotely, I’ve asked the participants to draw the Solution Sketch on paper and take a picture of it to be put on the Miro board.
From the Solution Sketches done, we did a straw vote. There were three prototypes that got equally voted, and even the CEO agreed that those ideas could be combined. Eventually, we combined those three and refined the idea together into a cohesive user testing flow together on day 3.
This storyboard was created together to unite the participants on the prototype concept, map out each step of the experience that we want to test and clarifies the pieces we need to prototype.
Afterwards, using the Miro board's own wireframe library and the divide-and-conquer strategy, we created a more detailed wireframe for each step of the user flow.
In the previous phases, the participants took a more active role in deciding the scope, defining the problem, sketching solutions and choosing the solution to pursue. In the prototyping phase, I stepped in and utilized my design skill to come up with low-fidelity prototype and eventually the UI design of the MVP to be handed off to developers.
Since we wanted to test the prototype with users in day 4, there was limited time to build a polished end-product. Therefore, I utilized a low-fidelity prototyping tool (Marvel) to build a clickable prototype based on the wireframe from the phase 3.
On day 4, I tested the prototype to 4 customers who filled out the survey in the pre-sprint phase
These are the key takeaways from the test we did.
Insight
On the most crucial section of the form, 3/4 users did not scroll to the end of the form, and they only answered the questions that are "above the fold".
Solution
I shortened the length of that section and converted into smaller subsections to make the form less intimidating and create a positive user experience.
Insight
Users would like to know what would happen after they submitted a form to get in contact with us, and whether we also provide automation services.
Solution
We give a short explanation in the contact menu, and provide a ‘How it works’ section in the homepage.
Insight
Since the first step of the configuration is giving a name, it gives the users an expectation that they can save later.
Solution
To keep the features minimum in the MVP, we decided to not include the ability to save & manage configurations.
We simplified the complex algorithm behind automation solutioning into interactive questions that capture customer’s requirements and propose the right robot, gripper and camera for them.
The long form is broken down into smaller steps, which only contains one question each. By allowing the users to take it one step at a time, it creates a positive user experience, increases conversion and reduces the probability that they will miss questions that are “below the fold”.
The first collaborative robots marketplace that provide a seamless customer experience and put up the prices of robots and components.
The marketplace offers different product categories like robots, grippers, cameras, starter kits, teaching kits, and so on. Each of these products present their product specifications in different ways in their brochures. Due to this reason, it is hard for users, especially engineers, to scan and compare these specifications. Therefore, the product page here aims to make it easier for users to do their job and find the right robots for their use case.
Unchained Robotics is a relatively new company in this industry. Therefore, it was important to establish trust with the customers. Since in the early days we predicted that most users would land in our homepage (we launched & announced the product on an automation fair), this page became the second most important landing page after the product page.
To reflect that we are offering a large selection of product, the vertical mega menu is used as the first element to capture user’s attention. Sliders might be a thing of the past, but since our analytics show that users interact with them a lot,we decided to keep it.
I added this section after a feedback during the testing that users would like to be informed about what would happen after they submitted a form to get in contact with us.
Other supporting pages
The hand-off ready design was created within 2 weeks, and with a collaboration with a web development agency, the MVP was launched in 2 months
With the marketplace and configurator, some of our customers have reported that they have reduced time required for solution search from months to days.
We have grown bigger as a company ever since. We raised seed funding a little more than a year later after continuously showing that our configurator and marketplace address pressing customer’s needs in the automation industry.
