Background
Moxo (formerly Moxtra) began as an internal collaboration tool, offering chat, video conferencing, and document editing via a standalone application or individually packaged features available through an SDK. Security and compliance became one of our focuses as a company early on, as we discovered that many financial institutions needed compliant collaboration tools.
Eventually, this close relationship with financial institutions led to a request from one of our banking customers: they wanted us to build a dashboard interface within their app to enable their high-value clients to quickly and securely connect with their relationship managers.
After building early technical prototypes for this concept and getting customer feedback, we found significant interest in a secure white-labeled client-to-business collaboration platform. While there were numerous solutions for internal team collaboration and short-term customer support, long-term client management tools weren’t common.
Getting Started
With that in mind, we began working on a mobile-first product to facilitate secure collaboration between businesses and their clients. The high-level objective was to assist companies in offering on-demand mobile services to their clients.
We planned to develop three product variations to support as many types of businesses as possible: a dedicated Moxtra app with white-labeled workspaces, fully white-labeled standalone workspace apps, and an SDK for integration into existing applications.
Each workspace would have two types of users with differing user experiences: internal users and client users. While the internal user experience could mirror our previous internal collaboration app, the client experience had to be built from the ground up.
The Client Dashboard
The client dashboard consists of various configurable modules and a space at the top that displays branding via a colored backdrop or image, along with a business logo.
The Your Team module is designed to build trust by prominently displaying familiar faces at the top of the dashboard, making it easy for customers to ask for assistance whenever needed. Tapping on a team member opens a private 1:1 conversation, allowing them to chat, share documents, work on assigned action items, and initiate video calls.
The second module, Groups and Topics, was designed to reframe our pre-existing group conversations feature into containers for working on specific projects, such as applying for a loan or purchasing a home.
Our goal was to make each conversation feel significant in their design, as many clients may only be involved in one or two at a time. The list is ordered by discussion activity, and tapping on any card opens the group conversation.
The Meetings module provides a lightweight way for clients to view and manage the upcoming video calls that they’re involved in. Typical clients are generally only involved in one or two occasional meetings, so a full calendar view felt unnecessary. Whenever a video call begins, the client is notified via a push notification and a temporary in-app alert banner at the top of their dashboard.
After launching these three core modules, we began working on building additional modules for businesses to configure their client dashboard further:
Feeds is a module that allows businesses to add an embedded blog to their client dashboard. The four latest blog posts appear directly within the dashboard, and tapping on any of them opens the blog post. Swiping through all four blog posts reveals an option to view a list of all blog posts.
The Quick Links module, simple in design and functionality, enables businesses to display relevant external links to their customers. Tapping on any of the links opens them in an embedded web browser.
For larger businesses, we developed two advanced modules beyond our standard offerings: Live Chat and Service Requests.
Live Chat enables clients to connect with randomly assigned support agents in real-time, while Service Requests allows clients to submit and track support tickets.
Bringing it to Web
With a successful and robust mobile app product offering, many businesses began requesting a way for clients to access their dashboards on desktop devices.
On desktop devices, modules are spread across two columns to take advantage of the additional space. To address some of the pain points we discovered when designing the mobile dashboard through the years, we designed all modules on the desktop to utilize the same container element.
This ensures the overall usage for each module is consistent for users while also giving us the flexibility to rearrange and resize them freely.
Conclusion
The launch of client portals proved to be a game-changer for our company. It resonated with businesses of all sizes and types, prompting us to shift our focus entirely to this new use case. As a result, we saw our overall revenue grow by over 10x.
This complete product reinvention was both challenging and exciting. It pushed me to dramatically improve my design and problem-solving skills. Collaborating with my teammates to creatively reposition and reorganize features within tight technical constraints honed my ability to find efficient solutions.
