Making complex data actionable: redesigning the lead journey timeline

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.

Summary

Jan - Feb 2024

Context

The Timeline page is the third most visited page in the CallRail app. It's where users go to understand a lead's full journey, from initial website visits and marketing touchpoints to the eventual contact. Despite the richness of the data, users struggled to quickly identify what mattered, connect attribution data to business outcomes, and extract actionable insights.

Outcome

Post-launch surveys showed that 60% of users rated Timeline positively. The redesign also drove a 48% first-week activation rate for call recording and a 44% conversion rate on the AI upsell card, making it one of CallRail’s highest-performing placements.

My Role

As the Lead Product Designer, I owned the design end-to-end, from problem framing and research synthesis through visual design and onboarding strategy. I partnered closely with Product and Growth leadership to balance user needs with business goals.

Problem

Users doesn't understand the data

The Timeline page showed everything (every web session, every touchpoint, every interaction) in a dense, undifferentiated log. Users were staring at a wall of activity data and still couldn't answer the most basic question: what led this person to contact us?

Why it mattered?

When users can’t connect conversions back to their marketing efforts, it undercuts the value of CallRail. This is especially critical since the business is concerned about retention. If users couldn’t quickly understand the data, they were less likely to see value early, and less likely to stick.

Constraints

Three factors shaped this work from the start:

The core data model couldn’t change. The solution had to come from how that data was structured and presented, not from adding more features.
This was one of the highest-traffic surfaces in the product. Any change had to improve clarity without introducing friction at scale.
Finally, the business had clear growth goals tied to this page. We needed to surface AI features to drive upsell.

Design thinking

Help users connect the dots

The Timeline already captured the right information, so the solution had to come from structure, hierarchy, and visual clarity. The goal was to help users quickly understand what happened and why it mattered, without requiring them to reconstruct the story themselves.

Key decisions

Prioritized clarity over completeness in a data-heavy interface
Made attribution understandable without requiring user interpretation
Set explicit limits on growth surfaces to protect usability

Provide high-level lead insight at a glance

Research showed users wanted to immediately grasp the lead’s journey without scrolling through dense logs. The original header mixed contact details with attribution data, making both harder to parse. I redesigned it into two distinct sections:

Left: core contact details

Right: a chronological journey summary

This created a scannable overview and aligned with how data is presented across the rest of the product. I also added quick links to help users jump directly to relevant sections.

Clarify cause-and-effect relationships

Previously, each web session appeared as a separate line item. A single user journey could show multiple disconnected entries, forcing users to manually piece together what led to a conversion. I grouped related sessions into a single, chronological unit and visually connected them to the resulting interaction.

Instead of: page visit → page visit → page visit → call

Users now see: these visits → led to this call

This turned disconnected events into a coherent narrative and made attribution understandable at a glance.

Improve readability and navigation

Users reported losing track of dates and times while scrolling. To address this, I increased timestamp visibility throughout and added a collapsible view to reduce noise, so critical moments stayed prominent. These changes made the timeline easier to scan while preserving access to detailed data.

Contextual onboarding - and the tradeoff

The Timeline’s high traffic made it an ideal surface for feature education. I embedded contextual prompts directly within the UI. For example, placing call recording prompts inside the call card where the feature would appear if activated.

This introduced a tension: driving feature adoption without turning the page into a promotional surface. To manage this, I established a “two-at-a-time” rule, ensuring users never saw more than two onboarding prompts simultaneously, and partnered with Product to limit total variations. This forced prioritization and ensured the experience remained focused and useful.

Outcomes

60% of users rated the new timeline positively, and the highest score was the most common response

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

A post-launch survey revealed that about 60% of users rated it positively, with 35% giving it the highest score. The redesign also resulted in a 10% increase in user engagement.

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. This was one of our highest-performing upsell placements.

Reflection

The key takeaway from this project is that growth works best when it surfaces features that genuinely help users. The cards performed best when they showed up alongside what users were already looking at and clearly explained how they could improve their workflow. It’s a reminder that growth works best when it feels like a natural extension of the product and when it delivers value for both the user and the business.

This project reinforced that data doesn't inherently create value. The Timeline already had the right data, but users couldn’t benefit from it until we made it easier to interpret and connected it to their goals.