Connect and Product Design

Hey everybody. My name is Ashley, and I'm the social media manager for Extensus. And I am here with Katie Hine. She is our UX Designer. And today, we're going to talk about Connect and product design. So I hope you guys are ready. How are you doing today, Katie? I'm good, Ashley. Thank you so much for having me. Good. Good. And so I'm in Nashville. Where are you? I'm in Portland, Oregon. I'm yeah. That's where I'm based out. Okay. And I love it. So guys, we work remotely. We're from all over the world, and I love that I get to have these conversations with my fellow extensive employees. So we're gonna go ahead and dive right in and just tell us a little bit about yourself, Katie. Yeah. So I have worked at stenses on the Connect product for the last about two and a half years. My focus has been to bringing the well known products that Expenses has developed over the last decades So bringing in the the fonts primarily has been has been my focus And and the hope is to create a familiar product, but also bringing in a more modern version of that product with more useful tools and being able to deliver something that people are more easily able to to go through as well as a whole and work through and make their workflow faster as well. Yes, because workflow is everything. We're busy and we just wanna our work done and move to the next project. So completely love that you're doing that. So let's talk about a few wins that you've helped to implement with businesses. Tell us about those. So a couple that I can maybe mention is, recently, I helped you know, make the color scheme a little bit more consistent. It looked a little bit outdated. The first go around. There's a little bit of inconsistencies throughout. So I went through, and I I made sure that looked a little brighter. The colors matched up everywhere. So that helps make it look a little bit more modern. As well as adding more accessibility. As the product is improving, we want to make sure that it is accessible to all types of users. So something I noticed was we were primarily utilizing color as our main way of showing font activation states. So I went in and I added a pill that shows the activation states with words, and it gives an added way of of showing users this is where it's at rather than just depending on color. So I'm hoping to continue adding more accessibility aspects within the product as we move forward with -- as Connect continues to expand. So tell us, Katie, what are some of the most exciting things that about product design that you're working on now? Well, I think in general, product design is very interesting because there's always a new problem to solve you know, every day is a little bit different, whether it's a big problem, a small problem, it comes in different shapes. So I think You know, it's it's kind of a little bit like a puzzle. I'm trying to figure out what pieces go where. You know, sometimes I don't it looks like it fits right and it doesn't quite. It's not the right shape. So it's just, you know, try a new one. And then that's that's how we we build, you know, the whole puzzle, I guess. As far as the most challenging, kind of going back to the puzzle metaphor, is it's hard to make decisions based on assumptions sometimes and no matter how much research I make, no matter how many users I speak, to. At the end of the day, I'm still going off of assumptions based off of what they have told me. So it's still a little bit of a guess. But, you know, as once the product goes in or, you know, a new feature goes in, I'm able to assess how things are actually being used on real time, and then I'm able to kinda go back to the drawing board and figure out where the right piece goes and make adjustments as needed. Got it. Got it. And so tell us about Katie some of the recent updates that you are most proud of. Something very exciting that just came in is font pairing on connect fonts. So this is something new. It hasn't in previously suitcase fusion. This was not something that was present there. So bringing font pairing into connect fonts in the browser is something exciting for our users to play with now. It gives our designers a new form of inspiration, and they're able to see the fonts that are usually activated together, so they're able to see what other designers are doing with their design work and what they're kind of seeing, you know, this matches up for them. So it hopefully is a new way for them to get inspired within their own font as well. Okay. Now it sounds like we get feedback, and I know you have to look at that and pivot if you need to what has been one of the biggest aha moments that you've taken away from our customer feedback? I think the biggest one would definitely be is that people are passionate, especially when they need a product, then people are are users that use product to the most are the most passionate as well. And that feedback that they give us is very is very helpful. And I think in general, we've just noticed how much they are willing to help us so that we can help them in return. So everything they tell us is very valuable. And I think, in general, it's just been it's been interesting to see how passionate our users are. So let's talk about the cloud. Tell us because I think a lot of our users may not know what are some of the benefits of going to the cloud? The biggest benefit would definitely be being able to provide weekly updates to the product. So this includes bug fixes, but it also includes being able to adjust features, bring new feature out whether big or small, we're able to give users things more consistently every week rather than just you know, within a period of a large period of time where they have to wait for things to come. You're also able to use the product within multiple computers. You're not locked into one system, and you're able to we're also doing the backups for you. So it's a little bit more I don't wanna say mindless because backups are important. But it's a little bit more we're focused on making sure that all of that is not something that you have to worry about. So the backups happen automatically within the cloud. Okay. Thank and thank you for sharing that. So my next question is what design features do you think everyone should know about? Definitely, I think the one I'm most excited about is Smart Tags, and that one applies to both fonts and assets. We're able to use AI to help our users find and browse their assets both fonts and just normal general digital assets. To find their to find those without having to manually tag them either, So they're able to find fonts with something like natural language, which is like Western, funky, were able to do the same thing for their, you know, say, like an image. I'm able to say, like, cowboy boots, and they're able to -- we're able to assess that without them having to tag their fonts themselves. So having that has helped, it is, you know, supposed to help them minimize them on the time that they have to search for it themselves and manually input those things for themselves as well. Yeah. And and time is money, especially as creatives, I I think about how much time could we save for the week or even the month if we could reduce time for each project, it adds up and it it actually put more money in creative's pockets if they really contract their time and just increase their their workflow as a whole. So I love that feature. So let me ask you something else, Katie, how do you find out what is actually important to our users? Kinda break down that process. Yeah. So there's multiple avenues that we use. The primary one we use is the feedback, which we get internally through the product. And that usually is, you know, a lot of pain points. But we're able to take all of that. We actually look at it weekly. So we look at all of the pain points. We're able to understand how many people are struggling with the same issue. We're able to assess these problems. And sometimes if given the permission, we're able to reach out to them personally and ask them more questions about what it is they're actually trying to achieve. We're also able to communicate cross functionally with an extensive self with our customer success team and our tech support team under getting an understanding of what questions are asked frequently by customers, and we're able to get an understanding of how how users are struggling if they're reaching out to tech tech support so that we can go back and assess and make changes based on all of these pain points so that we can provide a better product for them down the line. Fantastic. Fantastic. So I have one more question for you, Katie. What are some of the upcoming features that you're looking forward to? The biggest one I'm I'm very excited for is analytics we're bringing in analytics and reporting into the administrative section of the product. So we will be able to assess how your fonts are being used, what your fonts looks like, given given overview, we'll also be bringing it in for the asset side. So there's going to be just an ability to understand how you're using and how your assets are working for you and you're working with your assets as well. The other one that I'm excited about is Active Directory with Azure and Okta. We'll be bringing those in as well. So those are both very exciting, and we'll just drastically help all of our users as well. Nice. And I love that you guys are introducing analytics. I know in the social media world, we track those and you use that data to figure out what you are doing well in and if you need to pivot. So I think this amazing that you guys are introducing that. And I'm so excited that you had this conversation with us. And thank you guys for tuning in. Katie, do you wanna leave us with anything else before we leave. I'm just very happy that we're moving forward and, you know, keep keep giving us feedback. I'm I'm always happy to hear how I can continue helping. Nice. Thank you guys for tuning in, and we'll see you next time.