It’s March 2025 and we’re rolling into the Nook CRM pilot phase! 🥳 We also found time to sit down with Kieran, our lead designer, to reflect on the evolution of Nook CRM and the design learnings to date.
So whether you're planning to:
… then please do consider the list of digested learnings below. It aims to save you time, money and headaches!
Before jumping into designing or choosing a new CRM you need to document your teams’ current workflows thoroughly, and in as much detail as possible. Doing this will greatly help with the end user experience design of what you build.
<aside> 🧑🔬
“What I found when from the user research was that people knew the process and they knew what would happen but it wasn't documented anywhere. It was like “I do X and then Bill usually does Y and then this other thing happens next” but there was no way of seeing that. It was in people's heads.” —- Kieran, Nook CRM lead designer
</aside>
And hand-in-hand with this goes: avoid the mistake of thinking that you’ll establish new, improved processes or flows via your new CRM. You should try to streamline before you design, build or adopt a new technology.
<aside> 🧑🔬
“It’s easier to design [a CRM] with specific processes in mind. And it's easier to analyse what people are doing now, without software, and then look for ways in which you can streamline those processes. And only then build the technology around that. Rather than trying to solve it all at the same time.” —- Kieran
</aside>
Similarly, if you’re purchasing a new or first-time CRM for your team, go for one that offers simplicity in its interface and pushes the complexity into the background, rather than one that takes the approach of offering its users an array of features on screen at any one time.
Lizard’s are flexible, right? Photo by Mark Stoop on Unsplash
<aside> 🧑🔬
“The first task for whoever's managing the CRM is to set up the workflow steps and tasks-to-be-done, to match the flow of their organisation’s processes. I.e. they need to translate what they currently do on a day-to-day basis, which is normally managed in various other tools like Excel, or by hand….
And that set up is notoriously difficult to do inside of any software. Because with most established software there's a [pre-assumed] user flow that's been followed. This is one of those risks that comes with generic [systems]. The impact is you either adapt a version for your specific organization or ****uou find it's not fit for purpose.
[With Nook] we had to make the flow quite easy to understand and flexible but with enough detail so that it stood up to data capture later down the line. That was probably one of the most challenging aspects.
— Kieran
</aside>
If you’re working with client-facing teams, you need to avoid forcing your internal users into filling out all mandatory fields when signing up a new customer. Instead, help your users to capture only essential data initially and allow users to input additional details as needed. This allows them to keep the conversation with potential customers conversational, free-flowing and human. With Nook, we literally only made the GDPR consent a mandatory field, so we could get clients onto the system fast.
Design to avoid “double handling data". This occurs when teams enter the same information into multiple systems or places. And with customer-facing teams like community energy groups, double handling is likely to mean capturing things on paper first (for example at an event), before someone enters it into their spreadsheet or CRM later.
<aside> 🧑🔬
Double handling leads to redundant work, an increased risk of errors, and wasted time for everyone. To mitigate this, with Nook we designed a note-taking section, which would allow client-facing team members to drop notes in on the fly on a call, and copy paste them into the correct fields later.
</aside>
Photo by AXP Photography on Unsplash
Certainly in Nook’s early user designs our usability tester found that she was having to spend an inordinate amount of time explaining to potential users what our Kanban-style interface is and how it works. This was a red flag, and it was duly deprioritised!
<aside>
🧑🔬
“Keep the functionality of the platform simple. Keep it obvious, transparent and accessible to a range of tech literacies. Because coming into projects like this from a tech background, it's easy to assume that people know how to use specific features.
And what might seem like a simple concept for technologists, for different people it can be difficult to understand what that component or feature is doing.”
*— Kieran*
</aside>
A Kanban / card style approach to project management, as demonstrated by good old Trello. Be aware that Trello and Kanban may be basic concepts to you, but the above may feel like a radical interface to others.