Enabling businesses to effectively communicate with their customers and build lasting relationships.
Oho Chat
META DATA
Timeline
Oct 2020 – Jun 2023
(2 Years 9 months)
type
Web application
Mobile application
software as a service
Employer
Oho Chat
Boonmee Lab
Tools
Figma
Figjam
Webflow
Notion
Process
User research
UX/UI Design
Usability test
Design system
Product management
scrum / agile
Background
In recent years, chat has become the most popular channel for businesses to deliver customer experiences. In Thailand, customers prefer to contact businesses through social messaging channels like Facebook Messenger, LINE Official Account, and Instagram Direct Message. Boonmee Lab, the company I was working for at the time, had an idea to develop a chat-integrated platform for small to medium size businesses. There were several customer support chat solutions from both local and international companies. However, we felt they were not intuitive enough and lacked features to meet the needs of domestic businesses. Additionally, we had prior knowledge and expertise to tailor custom chatbot solutions for enterprise clients, so the company decided to jump into this market. At that time, I was the main product designer for this product from early-stage development to the public launch.

Currently, Oho Chat become one of the most recommended intuitive chat-integrated solutions for customer support teams in Thailand, enabling businesses to effectively communicate with their customers and build lasting relationships. We have achieved more than 3,500 active businesses within the first 2 years.
Challenge
One of the biggest challenges we faced was developing a new entry chat solution for customer support in an incredibly competitive market. The existing landscape was saturated with various chat-integrated platforms, each offering a range of features. Excepting from delivering excellent user interfaces, we needed to identify unique value propositions that would set OhoChat apart, emphasizing core features that meet the evolving needs of businesses.
my role
Founding Product Designer
Lead design development of web application and mobile user interfaces that are both intuitive and scalable through design iterations. Introduced new features integrated into the product’s core values to attract more businesses to use our service.
Facilitated design sprints that aligned product roadmap with user insights and market demands. Controlled the pace of design development to align with feature release milestones.
Conducted in-depth user studies, A/B testing, and usability evaluations from tracking behavioral data to measure usage of features and improve product onboarding tutorials.
Collaborated with cross-functional teams, including management level, developers,  marketing, and users to create new user stories and refine product backlogs.
Established a set of design system and variable components that streamlined the design process and improved consistency across the product.
Research
In the beginning, we benchmarked products in the market and created quick prototypes to visualize better user experiences. Then, we reached out to potential businesses, prioritizing customer support such as digital businesses, online merchants, clinics, and health and beauty services, etc.
We conducted on-site visits to demo our prototypes, observe how they navigated our products, and gather valuable feedback on the core features. Most of the time, new features were introduced based not only on customer feedback but also on comprehensive insights from users.
In-depth Interview
A qualitative method used to gain a deep understanding of user behaviors, needs, motivations, and pain points. By asking open-ended questions, we encourage users to share their experiences and perspectives.
Benchmarking
Benchmarking helps the team understand where they excel and where improvements are needed, enabling them to set goals for development to businesses can stay competitive and exceed market expectations.
Card sorting
A user research technique used to understand how customers prioritize features within a product. They are asked to rank the cards based on importance or preference. We can gain insight into which features are most valuable to users.
On-site demo
A live presentation of a product conducted at a customer's location or a designated venue. It allows potential customers to experience the product firsthand in a real-world setting, demonstrating its features, functionality, and value.
User testing
This method allows designers and product teams to observe how users navigate the product, identify pain points, and gather feedback on areas of confusion or inefficiency. There are various types of user testing, such as task flows, and A/B testing.
Product Strategy
Product strategies were created to align the product's features and design with customer needs, competitive positioning, and long-term business objectives. It is important to understand market demands, ensuring that each development phase focuses on creating value and maintaining a competitive edge.
01
Chats and messaging channels are becoming essential for all businesses.
More than 90% of businesses in Thailand have customer support on their social media channels, including small and medium-sized businesses. They prefer social media platforms over building their own websites.
Direction
Address a significant gap in the market where existing tools have fallen short in providing effective chat solutions.
02
While chatbots are a promising technology, they cannot yet fully replace every step in operational workflows.
Many products on the market heavily focus on building a smart chatbot that can replace human agents. However, we have discovered that people still need a tool that can help support their workflows in customer service, rather than replacing human agents completely.
Direction
Design an efficient chat platform that enables customer service teams to work seamlessly, whether collaborating with a chatbot or among human agents.
03
Complex products can cause users to drop off and switch to other tools.
When users encounter a product that requires too much effort or time to understand and use, they may feel overwhelmed and decide that it's not worth the effort to continue using.
Direction
Develop robust core features that can scale with evolving solutions, rather than overwhelming users with a multitude of features and overly complex products.
04
Language and pricing are important barriers.
Many small businesses are unable to benefit from worldwide services due to language barriers. Additionally, pricing for such services is often over-budget for these types of companies. Therefore, they require a localized product that is both affordable and easy to use.
Direction
Offer locally-friendly services that are more accessible to businesses, with reasonable pricing packages that fit their budgets, providing long-term value through subscription plans.
Product Positioning
To identify potential market opportunities, I conducted a competitor analysis and mapped the product landscape in the customer service space.
Zendesk and Intercom are widely recognized as leaders in this area, offering feature-rich, all-in-one solutions. However, their complexity and pricing structure primarily cater to enterprise clients. On the other end, many customer support tools aimed at small to medium-sized businesses tend to have a narrower focus, often specializing in areas like chatbot building or basic automation. While useful, these tools often fall short in providing the comprehensive solutions that smaller businesses need—particularly those looking to enhance their customer support experience while also leveraging conversational marketing and sales strategies.
This reveals a clear market gap that our product is well-positioned to fill: an affordable, all-in-one conversational tool that seamlessly combines chatbot building, customer support, and marketing automation. This solution would cater specifically to small and mid-sized businesses seeking integrated features without the complexity or high cost of enterprise platforms like Zendesk and Intercom. By offering a more accessible and streamlined platform, we can address the unique needs of this underserved market segment, enabling businesses to improve their customer engagement and sales processes without sacrificing simplicity or affordability.
Target Businesses
Nearly 100 interviews were conducted with various types of businesses to gain insights into their behavioral and operational patterns when using social channels for customer support. From this research, we categorized the target business types into distinct segments.
Online Business
Leveraging messaging channels as a point of sale.
  • Retain existing customers and win over new ones.
  • Distribute chats to relevant teams or individuals.
  • Clearly categorize customers and collect tracking issues.
Logistics
Relying extensively on a large team of human agents for support.
  • Track shipment status and resolve customers' issues.
  • Centralize customer chat monitoring in real-time and measure team performance.
  • Integrate API with existing CRM and logistics systems.
Health & Beauty
Improving customer service to gain customer loyalty.
  • Answer inquiries about providing services and available schedules.
  • Send new promotions or special offers to attract customers.
  • Need a shared customer information and knowledge base to streamline their supports.
Pivotal directions
The product’s initial plan was based on the company experience in building chatbot solutions for enterprise clients. We assumed that an affordable chatbot builder would be attractive to small and medium-sized businesses to reduce their workloads on customer service. However, it was proved wrong after I did on-site interviews and demo wireframe prototypes to local businesses. Surprisingly, a chatbot was ranked low in card sorting activity, used for understanding feature priority. What they actually looked for was a chat management platform that can integrate multiple social messaging channels and allow them to efficiently monitor and distribute customer chats to their admin teams.
During the beta version, we put a focus on designing features for conversational marketing which was believed to create strong value proposition for our product. Also since many online businesses were heavily using social media as sale channels to connect customers and sell their products or services.

However, after public lunch, I did product demos to various business industries, I had better understanding of service workflows and gain insights into their behavioral and operational patterns using social channels for customer support. I realized that they were keen on features to collaboratively organize shared knowledge base as well as monitor agents performance KPIs such as response time and resolution time.
After receiving these feedbacks, I conducted a market analysis to understand the product landscape. I discovered that most customer support solutions were designed for large enterprises and often required complex setup, making them incompatible to small businesses. While, accessible product usually had limited and specific integrated features. Therefore I believed that building an affordable, all-in-one conversational tool might be the right direction.

In addition to designing features that served customer needs, I also proposed a business model and unique pricing strategy to serve businesses having more than 30+ agents. We offered scalable solutions to serve unlimited social connections, which were rarely available in other tools.

For example, we enabled a dental clinic having several branches in different locations to connect their social channels into a single platform where a team of agents can provide supports efficiently. This has significantly strengthened the product position in the market and lead to a solid product roadmap in the long run.
Product Design
Insight #1
Some businesses prefer an integrated chat platform to assist collaborative workflows and enhance the performance of their customer support teams, more than a chatbot that can replace their jobs.
During the interview process with target users, including digital businesses, marketing agencies, beauty clinics, and health spas, it became clear that people didn’t trust chatbots to reply to their customers. They also found that setting up perfect automated flows of answers was too complex for non-experts. What they expected was a reliable tool to integrate different social media channels and allow admin staff manage customer service efficiently. Therefore, we decided to focus on developing the intuitive tool for customer support teams, enabling them to assist their customers with ease and enhance the overall customer experience.
Live Chat
The chat management system is designed to streamline customer service interactions, guiding conversations from initial contact to resolution. Throughout our development process, we integrated a rule-based chatbot that seamlessly operates within the conversation room. This enables both chatbots and agents to handle customer queries efficiently, with full visibility into the conversation history for users.
The interface is optimized for clarity, displaying prominent indicators for chat status, agent or chatbot occupancy, and the current stage of the conversation. We aimed to make it intuitive as much as possible to ensures general users can easily monitor and manage ongoing interactions, improving both responsiveness and overall customer satisfaction.
Design Alternative #1
The traditional layout maintains the familiar structure that many customer agents are accustomed to, with a sidebar for filtering lists of customers by status and assigned agents.
Design Alternative #2
Instead of keeping a conventional design, I explored an alternative approach to organizing the chat list. This design focuses on priority, ranking ranking chats from most to least urgent and clustering them by status.
What did users say?
The 2 design schemes were tested by 20 users familiar with online sellers.
Design #1
The testers found that tabs on the left were helpful in navigate between different groups of chat lists, excepting from the layout they were familiar. They suggested that it would be better if they can customize the arrangement of tabs or create their own grouping by themselves, despite the default setting already made sense.
Design #2
Most of the testers said that the design helped them to prioritize chat and create a clear structure for their workflows. However, they believed that it might need time to learn and get used to this layout. Additionally it was a little bit difficult to navigation between chat list comparing to another design choice.
Chat status
Most other available tools lack clear status indicators for how conversations are being handled especially after integrating a chatbot solution. It is important for customer support teams to know which staff member was assisting a customer and how they were responding. Without this information, support efforts could become confusing, leading to frustration.
description
user stories
As a customer support agent,
I want to see a clear status indicator for each conversation, so I can quickly identify which team member is handling a specific customer inquiry and avoid confusion.
description
user stories
As a customer support manager,
I want to know which agent is responding to each customer and track how they are handling the conversation, so I can ensure that customer support is efficient and smooth.
To address this issue, I introduced a chat status that changes based on the stage of the conversation to ensure a smooth transition between the chatbot and admins, as well as between admins.

When a customer contacts a messaging channel, a chatbot can provide an initial greeting and handle the start of the conversation. If the bot encounters a message it cannot reply to, it will display a different status to get agents attention and offer the customer an option to request human assistance. Once notified of this request status, agents must step in to continue the dialogue, provide support, and conclude the conversation.
For the interfaces, each chat status occupies different color palettes, helping to indicate whether a customer is being assisted by an admin or a chatbot. The scheme is also applied to bubble messages in chatroom so that managers can quickly see which staff member is handling a particular customer, along with the conversation history, helping them manage support cases more effectively.
Bot replied
Bot cannot reply
Agent request
Agent assigned
Chat ended
Automated Ticketing System
The automated ticketing system was introduced to help reduce the redundant workload that admins regularly experience in other customer support tools, where they manually create tickets to track various issues and their details.
After a ticket is created, users can view current response time and resolution time. They can edit name, description, and tags or attach media relevant to the ticket to provide more details about conversation for other agents. Activity logs offer a comprehensive timeline of how the conversation has been handled. Agents can also copy a link of the ticket and share with others for referencing.
When the chat status is trigger into Request, a ticket will be automatically created and start counting response time, meaning that a customer is waiting for support.

When an agent is assigned to conversation, response time will stop and resolution time will be counted and last until the issue is resolved. This feature ensures that customer inquiries are handled in a timely manner, reducing response times and improving overall customer satisfaction. It also provides an accurate performance assessment of individual staff.
Response Time
When a chat is triggered into request status, a new ticket will automatically open and start counting response time, displaying in status in chat room.
Resolution Time
When an agent is assigned to the chat, the resolution time begins counting and continues until the conversation is resolved. This helps support agents easily track how long an issue has been handled.
Service Performance Dashboard
Managers can view their customer support team's performance in a service dashboard that provides important KPIs and intuitive charts to compare collected data. Users can also see the total number of tickets from the selected timeframe and the average number per agent to assess workload. Additionally, tagging can be utilized to help businesses track and analyze the frequency of different types of issues handled by support teams. This detailed tracking and analysis enable businesses to identify trends and make informed decisions to enhance their customer support strategies.
Chatbot – Auto response editor
Based on user research with potential clients, we decided to simplify the chatbot features. Instead of attempting to provide a complex chatbot builder to tailor entire conversational flows, we wanted businesses to focus on setting up a greeting message and few automated responses for initial customer inquiries.
The interfaces focus on creating a minimal experience for setting up automated answers with simple keyword detection triggers (Partial match). Users can create reply messages from our available options including texts, attachments, carousel cards and quick buttons that can be linked to other answers or perform different actions, such as the agent request command or open link to website.
Insight #2
When there are new shared assets, such as promotional graphics or a new monthly announcement, many customer supports usually use external platforms such as cloud storages or group chats in other social media to distribute these updated information.
This approach, however, can lead to inefficiencies and inconsistencies, as different team members may use different methods for storing the assets. As a result, important updates might get lost in the shuffle, and team members might waste time searching for the latest versions of the assets. To address this issue, a more centralized and organized solution is needed, one that ensures all team members have easy access to the most up-to-date assets in a timely manner.
Saved replies
The Saved Replies feature in OhoChat allows customer support teams to store and quickly access pre-written responses to common inquiries. This functionality helps agents save time by providing consistent and accurate answers without having to type them out repeatedly. By using saved replies, support teams can ensure that their customers receive prompt and uniform information. The feature is particularly useful for handling frequently asked questions and standardizing responses across the team.
Create a new saved reply
Agents can create a reply pattern with multiple bubbles of text messages and attachments. This is better than other products that are limited to a single bubble and one attached media.
Media library
The platform includes a media library where support teams can store and manage frequently used assets like images, videos, and documents. This feature allows all agents to quickly access a single source of media, use the most up to date version and reply back to their customers with correct information.
Attach files in chat
Agents can choose files uploaded in library for attachment in chat.
Preview in chat
Selected file will be previewed in reply box. Agents can remove or change file before sending to customers.
Furthermore, I designed this feature to be capable of not only storing file for sending to customers but every file in the media library also has unique ID, which users can re-upload a new file to replace the current one.

Files storing on cloud can be utilized in different features such as the saved replies and chatbot responses. When users want to update the file, for example, to publish a newer version of advertisement, they can go to edit the master file in media library. This change will automatically update every instance where the file has been attached, providing an instant update without wasting time to update place by place.
Attaching instance
This interaction design provides a convenient experience and intelligent examples of how features can benefit each other within the platform.
Insight #3
The tools currently available in the market offer a limited number of integration channels for social media and typically feature expensive pricing structures for larger support teams.
Many businesses and services in Thailand usually have multiple of social media channels. For example, a dental clinic with five branches in Bangkok employs a team of 15 admins to manage customer support across all its locations. However, each branch requires individual customer interactions, therefore they need five separate Facebook Pages or LINE Official Accounts to provide messaging services for their customers. Most available tools in the market limit businesses to a single integration per social media platform, which becomes a significant pain point for this clinic. The inability to connect multiple accounts under one system prevents the clinic from using chat-integrated tools effectively, as they fail to meet the operational needs of managing multiple branches.
Scalable integrations
While other tools have limited integration options, OhoChat provide multiple and flexible integration of social channels.

From this insight, I proposed a flexible pricing strategy to accommodate target businesses. By selecting a package of subscription, they can choose to increase the number of channels and members. The strategy brought many newcomers and helped manage their scaling businesses without worries.
Flexible integrations
The platform allows users to add multiple of social channels to meet with various operational settings of businesses.
Flexible packages
Adjust numbers of integrations and users in a subscription package to match with scaling businesses.
Design system
I developed a comprehensive design system and implemented Figma variables to ensure consistency across the product's design. It helped streamline the design process, maintains uniformity in visual elements, and enables efficient updates, creating a cohesive and scalable user experience.
Backlog management
As a designer with a focus on product management, I played a key role in defining the product vision, creating comprehensive roadmaps, and anticipating client needs. I translated these needs into clear product requirements and actionable user stories, ensuring smooth collaboration across teams. This approach allowed me to effectively manage the pace of design and development, strategically plan feature releases, and implement scalable design systems and UI changes.
By combining my roles as both product owner and designer, I was able to bridge the gap between design, functionality, and business value, enabling more effective communication with the marketing team. This holistic experience has been invaluable in sharpening my skills in product management, strategic planning, and problem-solving.
Results
OhoChat has received numerous positive feedbacks from users and is regarded as one of the most easy-to-use chat solutions in the market, packed with abundant features that meet user needs and scale rapidly. This success is attributed to our deep understanding of customer insights and a well-aligned product roadmap that optimizes and connects existing core features, rather than introducing entirely new directions that would require substantial development costs.

By continuously gathering and analyzing user feedback, we have been able to fine-tune the platform to address the specific pain points of our users, ensuring that each feature is both relevant and highly functional. Our approach to development focuses on iterative improvements and seamless integration of new capabilities, which has allowed us to maintain a fast-paced release schedule without sacrificing quality. This strategic alignment not only maximizes resource efficiency but also enhances the user experience, making OhoChat a preferred choice for businesses looking for a robust and scalable customer support solution.