In-house CRM MVP
Context & Task
To reduce third-party software costs and integrate specific features more easily, Yandex Market decided to develop its own CRM. I joined the team for the initial phase, focusing on an MVP that allowed operators to process email requests. I began with several stakeholder sessions to align on the vision and requirements.
Service Logic Map: Operator & Admin Workflows
Field Research
To better understand our customer support team's workflow, I traveled to our call center in Oryol (about 300km away from our HQ in Moscow). It was a moving and eye-opening experience. I not only observed how operators process requests but also could try the role of a frontline support agent, answering live phone calls from actual customers.
I can truly say these people do an amazing job, balancing high-speed ticket processing (since their compensation is tied to the number of closed requests) with genuine empathy for every client with all the diversity of problems — from the classic "my daughter's birthday present is late" to helping an elderly customer who wanted to buy a phone but didn't even know what an email address was.
Yandex Market Call Center in Oryol
Interactive Prototypes
The project’s stakeholders had a very specific vision for how interface should work and look like. At times there were suggestions like, "Make this button red so people won't overlook it." To move the conversation from subjective opinions to data-driven decisions, I convinced them that we run a remote UX research and see if our decisions work. I prepared interactive prototypes for five critical missions — key actions representing our core MVP user flows.
Remote UX Research
I ran remote testing through Maze with 33 of our support team members — colleagues who genuinely agreed to take their time to help us. As expected, the reactions were a mixed. A lot of people felt nervous about the change and were worried about how long it would take to relearn everything. At the same time, many others were genuinely excited. They loved that everything they needed was finally in one place — no more jumping between tabs to find order details, customer history, or their own status.
Beyond just "likes" and "dislikes," the team gave us some great, practical ideas to make their lives easier, like making the email text area bigger and the labels more clear.
Heatmap for one of the tasks
Results
I wasn’t able to stay with the project until the final launch, as I had to switch to another high-priority task. However, I ensured a flawless hand-off with detailed user flows so the team could build it without me. I was sure the foundation we designed was visually polished, researched, and ready to make the operators' daily work just a little bit easier.
Requests Screen