Refining Pulse's template Content Portal
Updating Viva Pulse's template content portal to provide a more efficient in-line experience
Problem
The content portal was a key feature that customers wanted before purchasing Pulse. However, post-rollout, users were spending time retrieving custom content that they stored elsewhere.
Problem impact
Increased user frustration, risking poor product adoption and growth
Solution
A reworked content portal that allowed users to stay focused on their task through improved content access and management
Results
60% (10 minute) reduction of time-on-task for users & a 15% uptick in key customer adoption
Constraints
Working within a legacy backend framework
Keeping the design familiar while supporting a different type of content (questions)
Timeline
4 months (+ 2 more months for a post-launch critical update)
Process
Lightweight testing with users; Synthesize data
Narrow down on problem
Alignment workshop to develop hypothesis
Design explorations & feedback sessions
Usability testing
Iterating on feedback; Collaborating with engineering
Initial product rollout
(Fast-follow) Iterating on feedback to add needed feature
01. Data-Driven
Running light usability tests to generate insights
A key metric indicator was flagging that users were spending 3x as long making custom survey templates as we had targeted.
To narrow down on the cause,I started testing the current design with users, having them think aloud as they went through their task of creating a template.
The problem
Users were spending a lot of time retrieving the custom questions they wrote in survey templates. Without a centralized place to go, users defaulted to external storage or searching old content.
This caused slow task completion times and risked a higher user frustration with a negative impact on long-term use and adoption.
How the journey faltered under the current design approach…
An HR team that manages Pulse content wants to update a survey's content
The user now needs to add the question they previously wrote in another survey template
Here the user enters the content portal and wants to find the template that they think has the question they need
Now, the user clicks on a template and enters the template editing screen
They can now look through the existing questions on the template to see if they're in the right place
The question they're looking for isn't where they thought it was….
The user has to either:
Think harder to remember where the question is stored
Check if it's part of the question library, or…
Rely on an external word doc to store and then copy the question and its format verbatim
03. Cultivating collaboration
After synthesizing findings from usability testing, I structured a short workshop with my project team so we could review what we knew so far and work towards a north star focus.
The goal of the workshop was to align around a concise hypothesis that outlines our solution and what metric we are hoping to improve.
We first generated a few different hypothesis around centralizing and streamlining survey content access for users.
The hypothesis were then ranked and voted on based on the following criteria:
1
Engineering feasibility/cost
2
Speed to validate
3
Approaches that could leverage the existing design
The hypothesis
By giving users a centralized place to store and manage all types of survey content, they will cut down on the time it takes to create templates.
This will improve a user's time on task and user satisfaction.
04. Experiments in design
Exploring design options to test and validate
Now that we had a hypothesis to center on, I started to explore various approaches that we could eventually bring to users for testing. I had weekly syncs with the project PM and engineering team to discuss ideas and understand feasibility.
While building out the design I had to take into consideration:
1
Scalability of designs
2
Use of existing patterns that users are familiar with
3
Engineering feasibility
4
Ease of onboarding to new features
Different design approaches
Questions and templates in separate tabs
Question content is assigned its own tab within the portal, minimizing cog load when searching and supporting scalability
Combined table with all content
Questions are displayed in-line with templates, leveraging the existing UI and centralizing content
Search for questions by templates that contain them
Users can find templates that contain specific questions, using a design that would require minimal engineering effort
The separate tabs version won out for its focus on cognitive load reduction and scalability
04. Feeling Validated
Testing the designs
In partnership with the PM on the product, we developed a research/testing plan to validate our hypothesis and design approach. We tested a functional prototype with 7 participants over two days.
The results
Clear improvement (yay!)
6/7 people said they felt the process was more connected and they loved being able to stay in the app
Request to save unfinished work
5/7 brought up an ask to have the ability to save content that they're not finished editing
Searching by topic
4/7 users mentioned that they were used to categorizing and searching for content by assigned topic
05. A slight hang up
Collaborating with engineering to find a viable solution for drafts
The biggest finding to come out of usability testing was that users really wanted a way to save in progress work and come back to it at a later time.
As I reviewed our test findings with the product and engineering partners and proposed that we implement some type of drafting feature, I found out adding this would not be as simple as I first imagined.
The issue
Engineering pointed out that due to the legacy backend structure that Pulse was built on, allowing users to save draft versions (of org-wide content) would require months of engineering effort and rework.
The approach
After looking at competitors and not being able to find products with similar problems. I met with my engineering partners to brainstorm some of our options. Our lead engineer suggested we look at cloud-based tools that had to do with content like Google docs, MSFT Word, Notion, etc.
The solution — Saving locally
We noticed that these products all had one thing in common that we could leverage, the ability to save content locally on the user's computer. While this is normally meant for offline saving, it worked well as a compromise for not being able to implement a full drafting feature.
After confirming feasibility, and checking with our privacy team for any security risks, I drafted up a solution that was incorporated into our final design!
06. A good (not great) start
Rolling out the product showed positive results!
After 2.5 months of work, cross-collaboration, and research, we were able to ship this feature!
Shipped design flow (v1)
07. A quick-ish Fix
POST-LAUNCH DATA LED TO A NEEDED Change
Initial results
After the rollout of the updated portal, we saw a successful drop of over 10 minutes in the time users spent both creating new templates and editing existing templates.
A looming problem
While data was positive on our main success metric, a separate metric that tracked deleted content was on the rise. As usage increased, so did the amount of questions deleted, while the number of templates deleted by users remained relatively flat, but why was that?
The answer
After conducting short interviews with customers, I found that many users wanted to delist questions, but couldn't, so they ended up documenting them externally and completely deleting them
08. Rerouting… Rerouting…
Pushing to update the product roadmap
Luckily, I was able to gain this clear ask from users with just simple interviews:
Users wanted to hide questions when they didn't need them.
Using the data to advocate for a change
After discussing with my project PM and eng lead, I met with product leads to find a way we could work to implement a "disable" feature, noting that this was affecting our key metrics and could grow worse as our usage increased.
The result
We succeeded in getting this feature added to the roadmap for early next quarter!
This also gave me time to work out the design and plan with other designers to map downstream effects in other parts of Pulse.
09. The grand finale
Showcasing final design updates
After an additional 2 months of work to update the roadmap and collaborate with engineering, product, and designers of other product areas, the final design was rolled out!
Updates for content deactivation
Prototype embed
Want to click around a more functional version? Feel free to use the prototype below! (PW is included in my resume)
Key Impacts
60%
Decrease in time-on-task
The time to create a template dropped from 15 minutes to 5 minutes over a 4-month period.
15%
Uptick in key customer adoption
Multiple key customers who were unsure about adopting Pulse, adopted the product after previewing this feature.
Project takeaways
Areas to improve on
We had the option to run a private preview before full rollout of the project, however opted not to due to time constraints. In the future, I would want to budget our time better and negotiate for this step to avoid having to design a larger fix in a fully launched product.
I believe I also could have improved the usability test plan to focus more on investigating different tasks users want normally conduct in our portal. This could have led to the discovery of the need for disabling content earlier.
Lesson learned
Working through the drafting issue wouldn't have been possible without partnering with engineers on the project. For me, this reinforced the positive outcomes of collaborating cross-functionally.
