Mark B. Tegtmeier
In its first year of business, Tourial was already starting to make waves in the Atlanta startup ecosystem with its design tool geared towards SaaS marketing and sales teams. Several SaaS companies had already used Tourial’s platform to build interactive product demos, enabling their sales teams to focus on closing deals with prospects who have already toured and expressed interest in purchasing their software.
Tourial has a strong focus on empowering product-led growth for their customers, so this same emphasis led their co-founder to focus on user experience design for their own product early on. Knowing the first version of the Tourial platform required a high level of support from their team during the onboarding process, he hired my UX agency, Trailmerge, to make the tool easier for new users to learn and adopt without the need for handholding from the Tourial team.
Jason Cook, my first design hire at Trailmerge, and I started by conducting a thorough design audit, identifying detailed usability pain points and trends within the existing version of the app.
A couple of key needs that emerged from the audit were consistency (so users could more easily identify how to use different tools within the tour builder) and improved organization of the builder to improve comprehension and speed.
After completing the audit and leveraging customer research findings from the team, we set to work creating Tourial’s first design system of fresh, reusable Figma components and reorganized the builder interface to simplify and speed up users’ workflow.
We defined a color palette for the app, standardized iconography, and components inspired by emergent neumorphic design trends. We then implemented the new design system into a more usable, reorganized builder and a new Chrome extension.
Co-founder Andy Binkley and the rest of the Tourial team particularly loved the value the new design system brought to the user experience and efficiency of Tourial’s development team:
“Everybody at Tourial is excited about the new design system. Now we have a color palette and consistent buttons, inputs and dropdowns. Now we have everything built in components and libraries for our developers, so they can just pull in that design module for this button or this drop down and it's all consistent.”
A few months after starting their collaboration with Trailmerge, Tourial’s customers began using the newly-launched design system, Chrome extension, v2 builder with improved information architecture and learnability.
As our relationship continued, Jordan Brown and, later, Jenika Ashley, began to lead our work with Tourial under my direction alongside Tourial’s growing team to innovate on new features such as the Insights dashboard and to incrementally improve existing features.
On November 1, Tourial brought on their first full-time internal designer. Jenika onboarded her and facilitated design handoffs, which was made easy by our work as a team over the months of creating an easy-to-implement design system and organized Figma files.
Andy has summed up his experience working with our team of product designers team like this:
“It’s clear that Trailmerge brings a lot of experience to the table because they are able to sift through a lot of noise and data to get to the design goals that we actually have without unnecessary meetings.”