About Hints

Hints is an AI-powered automation app for capturing conversational data from messengers/emails and populating it into project management tools and CRMs without context switching.

Our team and design approach

Our core team for this project includes 3 designers, 6 developers, and a product owner. Besides that, everyone in the company helped to define and ship the new app version.

Each sprint during the four months of this project, we collaborated with our Data Science, Marketing, Content, and Business development teams a lot; we also are grateful to receive valuable insights, advice, and mentorship from the key stakeholders, founders, advisors, and investors.

Why we decided to redesign the mobile experience

We created the Hints to solve a particular user problem - building and maintaining the knowledge system requires a lot of effort. Users are overwhelmed with the variety of existing knowledge-storing systems and frustrated with their complexity. We aimed to provide a better solution for this and built the first version of the Hints app and its desktop version in 2021.

After testing the app's first version with 3000+ users for a while, we discovered that users were experiencing difficulties setting up the integrations and were confused with the app's complexity.

Hypothesis & User Story

User story: As a busy professional, I want an app that opens momentarily and is simple and intuitive for writing down my ideas and essential things. I want to set up my integrations with just one click.

Hypothesis: The new Hints app allows easy Integrations plus quick capturing. Users don’t need yet another management system; they want something simple and effective that does not require a steep learning curve.

Goals

User: To create a better experience for users by simplifying the app.

Business: We keep the Subscription Rate as our north-star metric and continuously optimize our efforts toward this goal. Rebuilding the new product version should positively affect our client's user experience and acquire new ones.

Solution

Our team did a complete pivot of the mobile experience. It was a tough decision to remove the logic we've been working on for the past months.

We shifted the focus from a stand-alone mobile app towards a mobile web experience and improved three critical areas of focus: capturing, organization and integrations.

To reduce this friction in the onboarding process that blocked many of our users from moving forward in the app experience, our team worked to improve the messaging and interactions on each screen.

Capturing

The new solution is much more simplified and provides a smooth and intuitive experience for capturing the information.

Organization

Now the app is working on the AI syntax without overwhelming the user. We achieved that by adding smart suggestions in mobile while capturing, a bot in messenger, and video tutorials. The user should not bother with the syntax setup!

Integrations

The refined product is live now, and recently we started usability testing, tracking the key metrics, and exploring social media reactions.

User Tests; Impact

Based on the results of our most recent hallway usability testing sessions, users love the simplicity of the integration and quick capturing; we saw an increase in conversion of up to 25% compared to the old version of the app and received positive feedback about the flow.

There is room for improvement, too; during the usability testing and the interviews, we discovered that some users need additional features of the app and require more product integrations than we envisioned.

We are currently tracking the metrics and social media reactions and conducting product experiments with precise case integrations based on the user profile (user’s role, goals, etc.). For example, we are exploring the task flows of a Product Manager, a Sales Representative, and a Recruiter.

Next Steps

As we continue to make Hints more helpful and valuable for individual users, communities, and businesses, we’re focusing on getting as much feedback as possible; the next big step for us is testing particular user scenarios - and then scaling this approach further.

We are preparing a couple of experiments now:

• A Zoom integration that allows one to get the automated meeting notes and store them at any convenient destination,

• Subtracting the gist from a Slack or Discord conversation to make an actionable note in any project management system.