Making it easier to understand lead journey and attribution

2023 | Feature improvement, Onboarding, Growth
Hebe Zheng (Lead UX Designer), Heather Lutz (Senior UX Content Strategist), Grant Sadowski (Senior Product Manager), and the Experience Engineering team.
Problem
The Timeline page, the third most visited in the CallRail app, offers comprehensive insights into interactions between CallRail's users and their leads. It details lead activities—such as webpage visits and marketing campaign engagements—prior to business contact. However, despite this wealth of data, we've discovered that the Timeline doesn't effectively convey information in a way that's truly helpful for users and their workflow.
Opportunity
Given the Timeline's high visibility and vital role in showcasing CallRail's value, it's an ideal place for contextual onboarding of new users and raising awareness of other valuable CallRail products. I worked with the Director of Product Led Growth to identify and prioritize the most appropriate features to highlight on the Timeline.
Outcomes
This redesign officially launched on February 1, 2024, aiming to better communicate the lead journey, highlight pivotal moments, and offer contextual onboarding education.
Post-launch survey
We utilized Pendo to display a feedback survey on users' fifth visit to the Timeline page for approximately two weeks. We asked users, "On a scale of 1 to 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.
Accelerated AI product adoption and increased user engagement (Growth)
Attained a 48% activation rate in the first week for our call recording onboarding content. 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 to date for our targeted AI-powered Premium Conversation Intelligence contextual upsell strategy. We present it to a carefully selected subset of our customer base, maximizing its relevance and impact. This stands as one of our highest-performing upsell content.
Design solutions
Provide high-level lead insight at a glance

From user research, we learned that users prefer to quickly grasp the lead's journey. Therefore, we prioritized designing a top contact card that's visually consistent and easy to skim by:

  • Organizing information into two distinct areas: basic contact details (left) and a journey summary (right)
  • Presenting milestones in a logical left-to-right sequence, reflecting the chronological order of events and maintaining consistency with CallRail's existing reports across the platform
  • Added quick-link buttons that take users directly to the corresponding section
Highlighting the cause-effect relationship

Our analysis revealed that users struggle to connect the cause-effect relationship between a lead's activities (attribution data) and their eventual business contact.

To address this, we made the data easier to understand and less overwhelming by grouping related website visits into one card. We removed redundant information and added indentation and connection lines to visually demonstrate the potential relationship between lead activities and subsequent business contact.

Improving readability and scrolling experience

We also discovered that users find 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. This improvement maintains the prominence of critical data points, ensuring that essential information remains easily accessible at a glance.

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 effectively showcase CallRail's features while balancing user needs and business goals, I collaborated closely with my PM to prioritize key features. We limited educational content to four variations and implemented a "two at a time" rule. This approach ensures we highlight essential features without overwhelming users or compromising the interface's usability.

👋 Special note from Hebe
For the purpose of the case studies, I intentionally provided a bird's-eye view of the problem space, solution, and its impact. But there's so much more to explore! If you're curious about the behind-the-scenes design process, let's chat—I'd be thrilled to share more!