Overview

Customers have a lot of different publishers uploading content to Highspot and want to ensure that it meets the quality and/or compliance bar of the company. The workflow approval feature allows publishers to create a review process, enabling them to feel more in control of the content that is being used and shared by sellers.

Customer Problems

• Companies need governance over the content that is uploaded into spots so that they can ensure that the appropriate content is shared by their sales reps

• Enterprise companies have a large amount of content and no way to manage the publishing process and ensure that content is organized and the correct metadata is added to make it discoverable by sales reps

Goals

Due to the compressed timeline of this project, we had to narrow our scope to deliver a high-value, baseline review tool for our enterprise customers. Our high levels goals for the MVP of this feature were to:

• Give publishers the ability to turn on workflow approval for their spots and assign reviewers

• Provide a simple UI for reviewing content and sending feedback on rejected content

• Build the feature in a way that makes it easy to iterate and add more customization after the MVP release

Build Fast and Iterate

We were in a very competitive sales deal and I had a little over a week to design an initial concept and prototype to present to the prospect. I worked with a Project Manager to quickly do a competitive analysis of existing workflow software, gather existing customer feedback about what they wanted in a workflow feature, and build a pixel-perfect prototype.

Validation Through User Testing

The prospect was impressed with the prototype and once the deal was signed, we got to work testing the initial concept via customer interviews and usertesting.com to validate our direction. While the flow of reviewing tested extremely well, we made some adjustments based on user feedback, including:

• Adding a detailed audit log to track prior activity on each piece of content

• Descoping to a single reviewer for the MVP

• Simplifying the UI to combine the item activity and review actions into a single area of the page

Sketching Concepts

I find that the best way for me to get ideas down and sort through the good and bad is to make quick paper and pencil sketches. I jotted down ideas for the MVP as well as captured ideas for future updates to the feature.

The Devil is in the Details

Highspot has over 20 types of items in a combination of content uploaded from other sources, content auto-imported from digital asset managers, SmartPages (landing pages) built in Highspot, and materials built in our Training and Coaching platform. Once we had the initial flow of reviews built out, we had to solve for the behavior of every type of item going through the review process as well as the possible stages an item can be in. Along with my PM, I helped create documentation and mocks for every type of item and the various stages they could be in.

Solving for Updates

One of the complexities we had to work through in this project was deciding on the behavior of updated items. This was especially complicated for dealing with SmartPages and how edits to a landing page would go through a re-review process. I created user flows to help illustrate the expected behavior.

Review an item and see the audit log history