Context

Small businesses and startups work hard to connect with customers through their products and services. Everyone in the company plays a role in creating experiences that customers love.

Many startups start without a user experience specialist on their team for various reasons, such as not believing in the value of UX or lacking sufficient funding.

In my experience, I have encountered many cases of the first type. Most often, the founders are developers who usually think, "Nah, we can manage without a UX specialist; it's nothing special," until analytics raise alarms and customer support is flooded with requests and complaints about poor experiences.

Client

Lyon-based Eden AI founded in 2021 by Taha Zemmouri and Samy Melaine, an AI integration platform, giving you instant access to powerful AI capabilities through a single API. Instead of juggling multiple services, you can quickly deploy AI features to your projects with minimal hassle.

Problem

They are faced serious challenges recently. Conversion rates on the site were poor, sales dropped significantly in recent months. Users complained about the API setup flow. Support channels were overwhelmed with requests and questions. In short, there were many problems. I won't even mention cosmetic and consistency issues.

They hired me as a contractor for three months, so I have strict time limits to complete the job, identify problematic areas, propose solutions, and design.

Later, I learned that there are deeper issues that will recur no matter how well I perform my job.

Every day, company owners generate unproductive, unplanned work and mess. Second, there was no dedicated frontend engineer or single frontend developer-only full-stack developers. This is also the owner's vision.

Philosophy

Productivity is the act of bringing a company closer to its goal. Every action that brings a company closer to its goal is productive. Every action that does not bring a company closer to its goal is not productive. _{The Phoenix Project}

No matter the type of cooperation with a company—whether as a contractor or full-time employee-you must be productive, a driver, not a passenger.

Approach

The timeframe was tight, so I propose this plan: Map all customer journey issues on the platform, assess their severity, and prioritize them. I suggest applying temporary "patches" as a quick and inexpensive solution to address UX issues. We agreed to revisit the patches and provide more thorough solutions later.

The customer journey is a bird’s-eye view of the moments that matter and how they relate to existing or missing touchpoints. Customer journeys are invaluable for understanding where specific product or service touchpoints can better meet a need in the moment while bridging one moment to the next. _{Orchestrating Experiences}

First, I needed to gather more context and thoroughly understand the platform's problems. Fortunately, thanks to Jeremy, a product manager, we had collected tons of customer feedback and Hotjar recordings. I also regularly participated in numerous feedback calls with customers.

Process

I scheduled weekly meetings for Friday to discuss with core stakeholders our current status and next steps, following the plan and design roadmap from the most important to less critical tasks.

An important part of the meetings was contributing to the customer mapping flowchart (Figjam), where stakeholders, the development team, and I aligned and stayed in sync. We placed there all findings, user feedback, and opinions.

Additionally, I update the team daily in a Discord channel about changes, progress, and sometimes memes.

Starting in week two, we successfully began applying our first "patches" to the payment process and API Template page. At that time, Eden AI's number of AI APIs was around 60, which is impressive.

My job was to ensure our rapid patching plan worked, so I constantly checked analytics and synced with Jeremy on the progress of improvements. If patches didn't go well, I tweaked them on the fly.

Results

• UX audit
• Impoved payment experience
• Redesigned Workflow
• Design roadmap
• Redesigned API template page
• Designed custom prompt builder
• Design WIKI
• Consistent UI kit, rules and guides

I had the pleasure of working with Alex at Eden AI, and he was a fantastic addition to the team. His strong UX expertise, combined with his ability to voice needed improvements, made a significant impact on our product. Alex also demonstrated a deep understanding of our product and its users. His genuine interest was evident in his work, and his insights helped us refine key aspects of the user experience. His skill in identifying friction points and proposing actionable solutions made him an invaluable asset to the team. _{Samy Melaine Founder & CPTO Eden AI}