A UX-Neglected Industry

The computerized maintenance management industry is almost devoid of current web design, code-bases, and UX trends. UpKeep claims to differentiate itself by providing a more usable product and being the first to put a CMMS app into the hands of technicians through a mobile-first solution. Being the fore-runner in this industry, they needed to stay ahead of competition and create more value to customers as they moved into targeting companies with larger and more complex team structures.

Summary

My mission at UpKeep was to create competitive advantage with amazing usability and design while guiding an engineering team in refactoring the codebase to a more modern stack. I was tasked into a dual-role of Product Manager and Lead UX Designer, giving me the responsibility to provide gap analysis, maintain a backlog, balance immediate clients needs against the long term product vision, improving the design and pushing new products out the door.

The Work Order page is the first page users are introduced to. The information architecture of the site was very shallow, exposing too many features at once in the main navigation. Based on watching actual users' screen sessions, I noticed they got lost with analysis paralysis or just left from intimidation, leading them to churn. Undertaking the IA change that I mapped out was the long term goal that the team slowly worked towards as we refactored and redesigned each feature, piece-by-piece.

The first project I was thrown into was to build out a Scheduling and Messaging feature to expand value for mid to large technician teams. The first step was creating personas based on our existing customers and stakeholders and anticipating a workflow that would help their business structure but remain flexible for multiple other orgs. With the UX groundwork, we immediately redesigned the collaboration tools and parsed out the designs into phased releases so we could get MVPs out as fast as possible to prevent top customers from churning.

Grabbing users' attention and educating them at the right time are key to converting them to paid plans. I mapped out friction points and neglected features to see how we could improve usage and upgrades. From there, I created a new look and feel for in-app education that would lead users down our conversion funnel and adopt our product.