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9 minutes
"As we enter a new era of AI technology, it's clear that product excellence will become a key differentiator in the market. With AI becoming more commoditized by the day, it's crucial for businesses to focus on creating top-notch products that truly stand out from the competition.
At Mozza, we understand the importance of product excellence better than anyone. That's why we're proud to have worked with some of the top players in the industry, including Lettria." - Adrien Montcoudiol, Founder & CEO of Mozza
With Lettria's new platform currently being rolled out, we realized it's the perfect time to spotlight how our teamhit so many milestones and were able to implement our latest updates.
In this interview, Bettina D’ávila discusses her experience working on the project on behalf of Mozza, our Product Studio, and how we aim to help our partners leverage natural language processing outside of data teams. Bettina shares her exclusive insights about the Lettria platform, including unique challenges of designing a text-focused platform and the importance of democratization.
Our Team-building Backstory
Bettina talks about how she got brought into the project and what was similar and different about the Lettria project compared to other tech projects she has worked on.
Lettria: I think the best way for us to start would be going through the origins of the Lettria x Mozza partnership. How did you get brought into the project?
Bettina: I’m relatively new at Mozza — I got brought into work with Lettria as my second project — but I specifically asked to join because I’ve spent the last few years tackling new sectors of the tech industry. I had previously worked as Product Design Manager at Doctolib (a massive French healthtech player) after spending three years working exclusively in e-commerce. When I joined Mozza as a product design freelancer, I decided to take on projects that help me branch out and learn up-to-date trends in the tech industry.
Lettria: What was similar and what was different for the Lettria project, compared to health tech work for example?
Bettina: The discovery phase, of course. I was constantly learning new information about healthcare and the medical industry in my previous job, and now I have become equally immersed in machine learning and artificial intelligence. But considering the larger mission, bringing something that was previously super complex and inaccessible to users is part of my job. I think that the barriers and complexities in these industries both need to be brought down and made accessible at a human level.
Before my time as a manager at Doctolib, I spent years working for AB Tasty, a SaaS tool to optimize user journeys on major websites. We took similar approaches for our client’s B2C websites, often the same tactics for categorizing information and simplifying complexity for our end users. For instance, Intricately presented graphs and data were blockers for certain segments of users and we wanted to build an inclusive, common user experience. On the other hand, at Lettria you have tons of amazing features that we want to spotlight, but they often require some background knowledge to fully grasp certain terms and concepts and actually get the most out of the product.
So, the path that we took was to build a digital experience that reduces the learning curve for the user, by introducing NLP concepts and guided information in a contextual way — since the ultimate goal for Lettria is to make NLP technology more democratic. A major priority was ensuring that users could naturally progress and evolve through the platform and develop their skills and understanding no matter their backgrounds.
Flattening the Learning Curve
Bettina discusses her personal experience with the learning curve of working with NLP for the first time and how she tackled it.
Lettria: How was your personal experience with the learning curve? What was it like working behind the scenes with NLP for the first time?
Bettina: Well, Natural Language Processing was an entirely new frontier for me. So I remember getting super lost when I first started using Lettria since I was missing some of the background and experience. But I’m naturally curious, and I took it upon myself to get immersed in the concepts and fully understand the steps of what was going on. This process was important to the work since from a designer’s perspective, breaking everything down into basics is super helpful.
Those baby steps and early understanding impressions helped us define how pretty much every end user will eventually use Lettria. We started jotting down the questions and context for these people, and I was able to look at the tool from different vantage points. Basic stuff like “What are my resources?” or “Where do I need to go?” helped me not only understand the user journey, but also the platform and what it offers overall.
Once you know the actions that are required to reach a specific goal, even complex topics like NLP can be broken down into simple segments. Then, over time, bit by bit you start to get a better grasp on what’s really going on regarding the tech side.
User Research Insights
Bettina describes how they interviewed people from Lettria and clients using the platform to gather insights for the project. She explains how they defined three product pillars, and ultimately decided to prioritize Customer Feedback Analysis in terms of where to start first.
Lettria: That’s a perfect way to launch us into my next question. You interviewed people from Lettria but also users on the client side as well. What were some of the best takeaways you got from that process?
Bettina: Yeah, so we did our internal audit, which I was talking about before. After working with Lettria and getting to understand the fundamentals of the service, we took a step back and pinned all of the “Aha” moments that we had coming in on the project. Then, to really cement our understanding, we took that information and began approaching internal users and clients, finding out what their needs and experiences were while working with the platform.
All interviews were super technical, focusing on the takeaways from scientists and engineers and they had a lot to teach us about building up the self-service aspect of Lettria. Plus, each persona we interviewed had their own need and way of looking at the service so it was tricky in terms of defining a universal user roadmap since the needs and expertise get to be so diverse and vast.
Lettria: So from there, how did you get to the point where you could prioritize a specific entry point? Which applications did you wind up tackling first?
Bettina: We spent the first month and a half or so exploring the platform with the Mozza and Lettria teams. Here, we got to explore product vision and overall values that Lettria wants to espouse. We basically got to an understanding that democratizing the use of NLP outside of data teams was an important business goal, therefore we developed with Lettria team product initiatives to support an actionable and no-code strategy that we can adapt to all sorts of use cases.
Based on that, we defined three product pillars, which are essentially the most appreciated parts of the product. We decided that first and foremost, what’s important to Lettria’s users is the time to value, meaning: how early in the platform users can see the benefits of using Lettria on their projects and thus, how much time and money they can save. Secondly, how easy to use the platform is. And thirdly, the performance, so people are able to derive using Lettria and see how powerful the tool itself can actually get.
Once we settled and all agreed on the set of pillars, we tackled what we call “platform stories,” which are basically sets of ways to pitch and launch the product based on its different use cases. We talked a lot about the potential regarding Voice2CRM but ultimately decided to prioritize Customer Feedback Analysis in terms of where to start first. In terms of the fundamental scope of solutions, after analyzing the general feedback we’d developed early on, Customer Feedback Analysis helped us create a formula to model the rest after.
Design Choices and Next Steps
Bettina discusses the challenges of proposing a new UX/UI and navigation system for the platform, and what she is most proud of in the new version.
Lettria: From there, were there any hiccups in proceeding? Was there any moment where you had to change strategies or change what you’d started early on?
Bettina: Honestly, it was incredibly smooth from that point of initial audit. We’d really done a ton of legwork in terms of understanding the platform and defining the user journey, at that point we just had to start adapting our solutions and putting everything into place. Working alongside the Lettria team was pretty fast-paced and productive because, at a high level, we were all on the same page objective-wise. There were some design choices that we would have to debate and a few smaller details on specifics to hash out, but nothing out of the ordinary.
Lettria: So what are you most proud of in the new version, now that the new beta’s officially come out?
Bettina: Really the entire structure and navigation system is something I’m proud of because it was truly a launch that I’ve seen grow from the ground up. This is my area of expertise, and it’s always super challenging because information architecture and navigation fundamentally define how people are going to understand and enjoy the entire platform. I love working on that stage because it’s where the logical and structural changes come in, but it’s a lot of work because it sets the stage for everything you end up modifying next.
There’s a lot of logic that’s been built into the platform with this new design, things like child view/ parent view and rethinking the overall hierarchy. Also, design details like the typography makes a huge difference in the way the platform is appreciated and understood. As a text-focused platform, we’ve made headways in terms of presenting information that’s easy to scan quickly or read intensively.
It’s been fun working on this project and there’s been a ton of flexibility in the Lettria x Mozza collaboration. I really think that users will appreciate the progress we’ve made in making the platform as approachable as we can. There’s still a lot of work to do in terms of accessibility and future integrations, but this new rollout definitely marks a huge improvement in terms of the values we defined and Lettria’s product vision overall.
Discover the new version yourself
Overall, the Lettria x Mozza collaboration has resulted in a platform that is more approachable, easy to use, and powerful. Check out all the latest features in this tutorial video, and create your Lettria account on the website to start exploring our toolkit for free.
