Background
My team launched a new tool for marketers, to send push notifications to shoppers. After we had launched the ability to send marketing campaigns, the next phase was to show marketers the huge potential for growth with our product.
My role: I was the UX Design Lead, working with a Product Manager, a User Researcher, a Data Scientist and two Engineers.
Year: Late 2016
The Problem
1. Our product was too modest. Our product is helping to drive significant revenue increases. But we weren't very good at showing that value.
2. Our users only used our product around once a week. I wanted to increase the daily active users, to make our product a core part of their strategy to increase sales.
Starting with research
We had an abundance of data that we could show to users. So much so, that it would have been overwhelming. We didn’t know which information they cared about, which metrics they usually use. We also wanted to build something that was different than existing tools, like Google Analytics. Some user testing was able to help us address both of these points.
Using a rapid prototyping tool (Axure), I quickly put together something to test. Because we didn’t know which data was useful, we didn’t spend time trying to organise. Instead, we wanted something fast, that would allow us to spark a conversation with our target users about what they wanted. We also had some ideas for features that we were sure would be useful (Real time data, Share with your boss/team etc).
Our first round of wireframes we put in front of users.
We ran user tests with 5 Marketers. We gave participants some tasks to complete, with some follow up questions. We asked them about their day to day role, and how a product like this might help them (or not).
Conducting a user testing session.
How it changed our design
Resources saved! We had plans to have real time data. We thought this would be game-changing, with users logging in so often to check the latest results. But our most exciting feature got a resounding NOPE. People just weren’t interested in data this granular. They wanted more of an overall picture.
People didn’t care about sharing functionality either. Most users said they usually just send a screenshot via email. This was really surprising to us, but it saved us significant engineering time too, woo!
Market fit: We heard that tools like Google Analytics are too complicated, and required a lot of configuration. Our tool would work out of the box for our customers. It should also be much simpler, and show some unique, valuable data.
Focus: We found a core set of metrics that marketers keep track of. The rest is noise.
We got so much value from testing early. Without wasting any engineering resources, we got invaluable feedback, that quickly let us iterate and fine tune our direction.
Visual design
Here’s the visual design that we were ready to ship. 🚀
Next steps
Iterate. In product design & development, the next step is to get into the hands of users, and collect more feedback. Build, test, Iterate, repeat.