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Image by Greg Rosenke

(Redacted)
ESTABLISH & ACT

How might we stop immediate bleeding/churn of the product and increase usability?

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WHAT IS (Redacted)?

(Redacted) is a web-based marketing automation platform (SaaS) that allows small and medium businesses, marketing agencies, and content creators to automate omni-channel interactions as well as qualify leads and collect contact information. Due to NDA, I have redacted all identifiable information on this case study.

(Redacted) has a long-standing relationship with Meta, which allows it to provide timely improvements to Facebook and Instagram integrations.

Due to shifts in funding resulting in layoffs, I was unable to complete this work. This case study is representative of just a fraction of the work I did while at (Redacted).

ROLE: UX RESEARCHER/DESIGNER

WORK COMPLETED:
APRIL 18 - JUNE 17, 2022


SHIPPED TO PUBLIC:
ONGOING

BRINGING MARKETING AUTOMATIONS
TO SMALL BUSINESSES 
SHOULDN'T BE ROCKET SCIENCE.

OVERVIEW

OUR PRODUCT HAD SERIOUS PROBLEMS, AND NO ONE KNEW WHERE TO START.

Churn was at an all-time high, daily active users were down, and CS was triaging issues.

Before my first day, I combed through reviews of our product from all over the internet as the paywall prohibited me from previewing anything.
 

The results were hardly shocking for a B2B SaaS tool: 

  • too hard to use

  • not sure what to do when you started

  • product updates drop with large changes were irregular, unannounced, and unsupported by new documentation or tutorials

  • too complicated

  • not enough native integrations

  • functions don't align to advertising (lead qualification vs. generation)

Just looking at the dashboard and top navigation, I wasn't quite sure where to start or what things did even though I had some familiarity with the product. It took me a few hours and stacks of post-its to map out just these main sections on a giant Panera booth table, and I had more questions than answers.

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THE GLOBAL VIEW ACROSS THE PRODUCT WAS MISSING.

Eventually, this look at our navigation and what we were presenting first to customers turned into a detailed Miro board where I began to create missing UX artifacts.

Everything that existed was scattered in different Google Drives owned by different people; nothing was centralized and product goals weren't clearly articulated in something that was shared with the product and engineering teams.

What was the main customer journey? What were our major use cases? Did we have flows somewhere other than random JIRA tickets?

This led to the creation of a Product Dashboard on Notion, to begin corralling all of these documents and data, as well as find a place to collaborate and store customer video call links, research and insights, and just general resources that we used.

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While establishing artifacts and continuing work on JIRA tickets so that there were always things to push to UI/dev, I took a deep-dive into Hotjar and began setting up user research video call sessions with existing customers.

Below is a Google Slides doc showing some of the insights and suggested action steps to take. This is one of multiple such presentations, excluding items that went straight to JIRA. I would've liked to further explore these with customers and provide more research to back up these actions before presenting solutions, but due to time, budget, and stakeholder constraints that wasn't possible. 

Apologies: Google would not allow disabling of auto-advancing, so I set it to 30 seconds per slide. You can control the slideshow manually with the arrows in the bottom left corner.

From these insights and action steps, we were able to move forward with prototypes of everything suggested as well as began to develop user research. After developing the protocol and recruiting, I interviewed two users for deeper insights. Due to layoff, I was unable to complete the research.

Some actions that are currently prototyped and awaiting development are:

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Dashboard - simplified top nav, clear directions on what to do next, clear channel connections

While we didn't ultimately have much input on what was included, we were able to make the dashboard more usable and valuable.

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Thanks to the review flags, the users are able to see at a glance what items need to be changed, customized, or configured from the template.

Another large reorganization was the use of settings throughout the web app.


Each widget in input triggers and automations has its own settings. In addition, there are multiple global settings scattered across the web app in multiple locations. 

I collected settings from across the web app an analyzed their current usage, context, and location. Then, I reorganized them to better suit user needs. 

Because of time, budget, and requests from stakeholders, I was unable to study or test this with users. I did, however, involve several members of the Sales/CS team, as they are also users when managing accounts for our higher-paying customers to ensure we had feedback from someone who routinely uses our product for its intended purpose.

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This is a closer look at one of the NEW settings organization structures.

Had I been able to continue, my next steps would've been to: 
 

  • continue user research in established areas

  • examine how to better simplify the flows of the app/make them more intuitive

  • begin research with non-customers about their needs with marketing automations to test hypotheses about our customer base and general market fit

  • continue establishing better design documentation for future reference

  • begin an accessibility overhaul

  • generate more iterations and ideas before putting them into action

  • establish a user testing program before prototypes were assigned to dev sprints

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