Hudl - Commitment to Pay

While the developers and QAs on my squad handled the technical discovery side of the project, I needed to zoom out and understand how we could create new billing and subscription creation processes that improved the experiences of all players in a complex ecosystem. Not only did we need to make sure our customers were able to easily pay and sign up for new products/services, but I also aimed to improve the workflows of key stakeholder groups like our Sales, Legal, Hardware Operations, Revenue Systems, and Finance teams.

In order to understand the current workflows and pain points of these various internal user groups, I started my research by conducting a series of user interviews. As a tangible delivery, after digging in to understand the actions and roles of 10 different employees at Hudl I created a series of service blueprints. With these, I laid out what our current sales and access provisioning processes looked like and where all of the different internal players plugged into this process. These service blueprints served to align the product team on the current state of things and identify exactly when/where bad data was getting created.

As well as creating service blueprints over our complex sign up and payment processes, I also partnered with a quality assurance developer on the squad to audit and document all of our self-service flows that were creating data in our systems prematurely. With this research, my squad gained a holistic understanding of the current landscape and a general understanding of the scope of work needed to be done to fix it.

Once we fully understood the lay of the land, it was time to propose and implement a solution. Taking inspiration from Tim Brown’s book, Change by Design: How Design Thinking Transforms Organizations and Inspires Innovation, I lead my development squad through two different exercises in divergent and convergent thinking. First, in a sketch session myself and the rest of the squad spent time ideating on as many possible ideas for solutions to the problem as possible. Second, the squad converged on those ideas to identify which of our possible proposed solutions was 1) the most feasible to accomplish in the remainder of the quarter and 2) provided the most value to both stakeholders and external users. At the end we arrived at a solution that is laid out in the service blueprint below.

In order to stop our various self-service sign up flows from creating data in Zuora prematurely we ultimately decided to replace them with forms that would put potential customers in contact with a sales rep. While this may seem a bit counterintuitive to the casual viewer, the proposal provided benefits to both the business and our end users. As a B2B business, Hudl primarily generates revenue by selling large packages to schools and athletic clubs rather than individual, one-off subscriptions. Replacing touchless sign up flows with contact forms ensured that we’re not underselling customers and that new users are getting the right products that fit their needs the best. Furthermore this approach allowed sales reps to set trial lengths as they saw fit rather than one-size fits all.

After going through the necessary sales conversations and optional trial period, if a customer was ready to make a purchase the sales rep would create an order form and send it over to the customer through Adobe Sign. The signature of an order form would effectively capture a commitment to pay from the customer, meaning at that point we could logically create the necessary billing data in our systems. Once the Adobe Sign status was updated as signed, a Salesforce workflow would automatically generate a task for our BSS (Billing System Specialist) team in India to create the subscription. This was a temporary solution before we could move towards building out a full CPQ. They would then create the necessary subscriptions and invoice using an internal sign up tool. While all of the process changes to salesforce and Adobe sign were handled by our Revenue Systems team, my squad was tasked with the design and development of the internal sign up tool.

After spending most of the project flexing my service design muscle, it was time to zoom back in on UX/UI design for one part of the final solution: the internal sign up tool. My goal in this work was to provide Hudl’s internal BSS users with an interface that allowed them to efficiently build complex subscription packages and invoice them appropriately. To do this I first started by widely iterating on different wireframes. I converted my best ideas into higher fidelity mocks and presented them to a group of other designers at Hudl for critique. After some slight adjustments, I was ready to start testing to validate that internal users were able to efficiently and correctly create subscriptions/invoices using the internal sign up tool (you can find an interactive prototype of that tool here).

Since the BSS team was based out of Hudl’s India office and did not speak English as a native language I had to alter my standard approach to usability testing. Instead of hopping on a Zoom call and observing them use the product, I organized a series of unmoderated usability tests which I later observed. This approach provided two distinct benefits in validating the usability of the product:

1. It broke down the time zone barrier by allowing BSS members to run through the product on their own time and allowed me to review the tests on my own time.

2. It broke down the language barrier by allowing non-native english speakers to write out their thoughts over the product rather than to speak them.

Finally before full launch of the Commitment to Pay process, I conducted a few test bashes over our internal sign up tool and our process changes in Salesforce to reveal any bugs that needed to be addressed before launch.

Though creating Internal tooling isn’t the flashiest thing that a product designer can work on, the Commitment to Pay project provided tons of real value to both our external customers and Hudl as a business. After the launch of the new sales process:

• Hudl’s finance team was now able to close accounting periods and confidently trust the data in our Billing systems.

• Customers could trust that they were getting the products that fit their needs with a more personalized sales experience.

• Sales reps no longer had to waste their time chasing payments, but could focus solely on making sales.

• The BSS team reported vast improvements in their daily workflows with the creation of the internal sign up tool.