Field Types

Background

HubSpot is a technology company that provides various software solutions for sales, customer support, marketing, and CRM. During my tenure at HubSpot, I worked as a Product Designer on the CRM Setup team, which included a designer, engineer, and product manager. Our primary responsibilities involved imports, object and property settings, and exports. Our core end-users were known as "administrators," who performed various tasks such as importing contacts, creating fields, and assigning permissions. For instance, a company might have a "HubSpot admin" who is responsible for configuring the "HubSpot CRM," allowing the Sales team to manage customer relationships. Admins have additional responsibilities within their organizations and are typically members of Sales, Customer Support, Marketing, or Operations.

Admins aim to maintain accurate and secure data. Our hypothesis is that to achieve this goal, we need to create more field types and validations. This will enable administrators to gather precise and reliable data, increase their effectiveness, and help their organizations grow.

Problem and Scope

We wanted to help CRM admins collect and use accurate data by validating input data, starting with collecting phone numbers. My pursuit was to enable administrators to ensure accurate data entered their CRM

• 1-month

My Role

As the directly responsible individual (DRI) for the Product Design and CRM-Setup product triad, I worked in close collaboration with a Product Manager and a Tech Lead. Together, we partnered with CRM backend developers and cross-functional teams to achieve our goals.

Discovery and problem definition: how do our customers feel today?

This project primarily services administrators, with sales reps and other employees as secondary users. During discovery, we aimed to determine the need for additional field types and validations. We analyzed qualitative data through the HubSpot ideas forum, internal support data, and quantitative data via Amplitude. This information has enabled us to develop an architecture and interfaces that we can test with users to improve the product design.

• Audit

• Amplitude data

• Qualitative data (Looker/Forum)

• Lite competitive analysis

Concept Exploration: “How might we…?”

For quick design sprints, I prefer to use rapid prototyping. As we saw in the Learn cycle, we need to gather the necessary information about our audience, their behaviors, and historical data before we start exploring. In the images below, you will see a mix of paper and digital concepts that I've created. I used the following guiding questions to scope out my design exploration:

1. What problems are customers experiencing today that having more field types and customer-define validations would solve?

2. How might we make it easier for users to control how data is entered into HubSpot so they can have clean and accurate information?

3. What are the formatting options users need across our existing field types?

4. What field types and validations do powerful CRMs and our competitors value, and how do they pursue this value proposition to customers?

5. What field types are missing from HubSpot that would be of high value to our customers?