Making it easier to understand lead journey and attribution

CallRail 2024 | Drove Adoption & Engagement

Hebe Zheng (Lead Product Designer), Heather Lutz (Senior Content Strategist), Grant Sadowski (Senior Product Manager), and the Experience Engineering team.

Problem

The Timeline page is the third most visited page in the CallRail app. It's where customers go to understand a lead's full journey, from initial website visits and marketing touchpoints to the eventual phone call or form submission. Despite the richness of the data, the experience wasn't delivering clarity. Users struggled to quickly identify what mattered, connect attribution data to business outcomes, and extract actionable insights. This led to usability issues and created a strategic risk.

Opportunity

The Timeline's high visibility and central role in showcasing CallRail's value made it the perfect place for contextual onboarding and product discovery. I partnered with the Director of Product Led Growth to identify and prioritize which features to highlight that would create the highest business leverage without compromising usability.

Design solutions

Provide high-level lead insight at a glance

Research showed users wanted to immediately grasp the lead’s journey without scrolling through dense logs.

I introduced a redesigned top contact that's visually consistent and easy to skim by:

Separated basic contact details (left) from journey summary (right)
Displayed milestones in a left-to-right chronological sequence
Maintained consistency with existing reporting patterns across the platform
Added quick links for direct navigation to relevant sections

2. Clarify cause-and-effect relationships

Users struggled to connect marketing activity (web visits, campaign clicks) with the eventual call or conversion.

To reduce cognitive load:

Grouped related website visits into single cards
Removed redundant metadata
Added indentation and visual connection lines
Structured events to imply progression toward business contact

The redesign made attribution more legible , transforming disconnected events into a coherent journey.

3. Improve readability and scrolling experience

Users reported that the timeline's scrolling experience frustrating, often losing track of dates and times. To address this, we enhanced the visibility of timestamps throughout the timeline and introduced a collapsible view.

Increased timestamp visibility
Introduced collapsible views
Preserved prominence of key conversion moments

The experience became easier to skim while maintaining depth for users who needed it.

4. Enhancing feature awareness through contextual education

We focused on highlighting key CallRail features through contextual onboarding. We display targeted educational content at crucial moments in the user journey. For example, we placed call recording prompts within the call details card, exactly where the recording interface would appear if activated.

To balance growth and usability, I collaborated closely with the Director of Product-Led Growth to:

Limit onboarding to four variations
Implement a “two at a time” rule
Target content based on eligibility

Outcomes

Improved journey clarity

This redesign officially launched on February 1, 2024. Using Pendo, we surveyed users on their fifth visit to the redesigned Timeline:

“On a scale of 1–7, how would you rate the new Timeline’s effectiveness in helping you understand your lead’s journey compared to the previous version?”

58% of users rated the new Timeline positively, with 35% giving it the highest score. This validated that the redesign improved comprehension without requiring a learning curve.

Accelerated AI product adoption

Attained a 48% activation rate for our call recording onboarding. This cornerstone feature drives CallRail's AI-driven offerings like transcripts, call summaries/sentiment, and coaching. By increasing call recording adoption, we successfully expanded the potential user base for our AI product suite.

Achieved a 44% conversion rate for an AI-powered Premium Conversation Intelligence contextual upsell. We presented it to a carefully selected subset of our customer base, maximizing its relevance and impact. This was one of our highest-performing upsell placements.

My takeaway

The key takeaway from this project is that product growth should focus on surfacing features that genuinely help users. The onboarding and growth cards were most successful when they showed features in the context of what users were already viewing and explained how those features could improve their workflow. This project shows that there is a way to elegantly upsell or cross-sell to existing users when we focus on a win-win scenario for both the business and the user.