Research

Discovery

Our first step was conducting interviews with clients and internal users. These conversations were enlightening and revealed a common pain point: users had become heavily reliant on tags to organize their projects within our platform. This dependence stemmed from the fact that each survey was identified by an external-facing title, and many surveys shared similar (or even identical) titles. Consequently, users increasingly depended on tags to distinguish their projects, posing ongoing challenges for long-term platform usage. To bolster our findings, we also reviewed product requests on AHA and found organization (or the lack thereof) to be one of the most common user pain points.

We then proceeded with competitive research, examining how competitors like Qualtrics, Toluna, SurveyMonkey, and UserTesting organized their platforms. Additionally, we explored the organizational mechanisms of everyday tools such as Google Drive and Figma. This analysis allowed us to identify industry best practices, potential areas for innovation, and the standards that shaped the user experience landscape.

The initial insights from user interviews and competitive analysis provided the foundation for our central question: How can we assist users in better organizing their work on our platform?

Workshops

I conducted two rounds of workshops that brought our team and other project stakeholders together. These sessions employed two key techniques: empathy mapping and round-robin ideation.

Empathy mapping enabled us to step into the users' shoes and view things from their perspective, fostering a deeper understanding of their feelings, thoughts, and needs. This step was crucial as it allowed us to design solutions that genuinely addressed their challenges.

Round-robin ideation was equally valuable, fostering a collaborative environment where everyone could contribute ideas. We encouraged open discussions and brainstorming, ensuring every voice was heard. This approach leveraged the collective intelligence of our team and stakeholders, yielding innovative solutions.

The outcomes of these workshops were pivotal in our design process, identifying specific user needs and challenges that required our attention. Instead of conjecture, we gained real insights and ideas directly from those we designed for.

By involving our team and stakeholders through empathy mapping and round-robin ideation, we maintained an inclusive, user-centered process. These collaborative sessions were instrumental in laying the groundwork for the design phase, where our collective understanding and creative ideas would translate into tangible solutions for our users.

Users

We focused on solutions to address the needs of the following user types:

1. Internal users: These are employees within our company who frequently use the platform, particularly in roles within the Center of Excellence or Client Success. Their usage involves regular interaction with clients.

2. Enterprise clients with shared licenses: These client users are part of larger teams responsible for programming and launching pre-approved surveys on our platform. They typically share a license with multiple team members, each managing their own projects within the same team account.

3. SMB/Mid-sized clients with solo or shared licenses: These client users are either the sole users of the platform within their companies or share the license with 1-2 others. Access to the platform by others in their company is infrequent.

Limitations

Due to limited resources, we had to work within many of our current design patterns, which included some modal-on-modal interactions that aren’t ideal. Despite initial proposals for more contextual, in-line editing, negotiations between the UXUI and front-end teams resulted in our having to go the modal route.

Solution

After exploring multiple concepts and receiving rounds of internal feedback, along with conducting initial usability testing with our previous interviewees, the product manager and I agreed that organizational improvements would unfold in three main phases:

1. Improvements to the "Action List": This involves enhancing the page where clients view a comprehensive list of their launched projects.

2. Creation of a "Folders" feature: This feature enables users to visually group their work more effectively. After multiple rounds of research we landed on “folders” because it most closely met user needs while freeing up the concept of “projects” for potential future use.

3. Internal Titling & Metadata: This enhancement allows users to uniquely identify their projects with specific names and assign additional attributes for future filtering purposes.

4. Introducing Popovers: I was delighted to introduce the popover component into our interface, which allows us to embed educational information using different media without cluttering the page. The popover was incorporated into our design system as we work to encourage users’ autonomy while creating a survey.

Key Screen Wireframes

Key Flows

Creating a Folder

Adding Multiple surveys to a folder

Adding Internal Metadata to a Survey during setup

Figma was being buggy, so this one’s a recording of the live product. Featuring the educational popovers I was excited to introduce.

Impact

• Since launching in Q4 2023:

  • Folders have been adopted by >20% of our total users

  • 47% of launched surveys have an Internal Description, letting us capture the “why” behind each project.

• The folder and internal metadata infrastructures create a basic framework from which our platform may expand to other functionalities such as Projects and Brand Trackers, where multiple surveys are grouped within a larger parent container, potentially for a shared purpose.