A Centralized portal for users
Refining Pulse's template Content Management Portal
COMPANY
Microsoft
ROLE
Lead Designer
Duration
4 months
Team members
1 PM, 2 Engineers, 1 Content designer
Overview
Pulse's CMS is an admin-level tool that helps HR teams manage templated survey content across their organization.
As the design lead, I built out from an existing MVP adding new content management features to improve users time-on-task, reduce screen switching, and centralize user workflows.
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
Building on top of an existing design
Process
Lightweight interviews 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
The problem:
Users were spending 3x (over 20 minutes) as long making custom survey templates as we had targeted for the MVP version of Pulse's content management portal.
01. User interviews
Narrowing down the cause
User interviews revealed:
Reliance on external programs
Users were heavily reliant on storing survey question content externally since there was no way for them to do this within the Pulse app
Tedious manual searches
Some users relied on finding content by searching through previously used survey templates. This was a long process and often didn't even work
02. Visualizing pain points
Mapping out the existing user journey
An HR team wants to make changes to a customized question
The user (HR admin) starts their journey needing to find the question that could be stored in multiple places
Here the user enters the template management portal to look for the survey template the question may be part of
Unsure on where exactly to look, the user clicks into different templates, but hasn't found the content they need
They look through the existing questions on multiple templates to see if they can find the question content they need
Frustrated, the user gives up searching and finally tries…
Checking if it's part of Pulse's library of existing questions. Even though they are looking for a custom question and the library only stores stock questions
Overwhelmed after finally finishing their task, the user resorts to creating an external word doc to store questions for future use
The user must now leave Pulse each time and manually copy over content line by line.
03. Working cross-functionally to align
Aligning partners through a problem-framing workshop
After synthesizing findings from the user interviews and mapping the current user journey, I structured a problem framing workshop with my project team (PM, engineering, content, and PM lead)
User needs from workshop
Stay within app to complete tasks
Find needed content faster
Centralized workspaces
Business goals from workshop
Increase customer adoption
Decrease time-on task
From this workshop a focused problem statement was developed
Users spend too much time retrieving survey content across scattered sources, slowing template creation, reducing satisfaction and hurting adoption. Streamlining content management into a cohesive experience will improve time-on-task and drive adoption.
04. Designs and feedback
Exploring design options
With alignment on a problem statement, I started with wireframes of various approaches that we could eventually bring to users for testing.
I also held weekly syncs with the project PM and engineering team to get feedback and understand feasibility and use of existing patterns.
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
Combined table with all content
Questions are displayed in-line with templates, leveraging the existing UI and centralizing content
Questions and templates in separate tabs
Question content is assigned its own tab within the portal, minimizing cog load when searching and supporting scalability
After a design feedback session, the separate tabs version won out for its focus on cognitive load reduction and scalability
05. Validation
Testing the designs
In partnership with the PM on the product, I developed a research/testing plan to validate the design approach. We tested a functional prototype with 7 participants over two days.
Results
Clear improvement
6/7 people said they felt the process was more connected and they loved being able to stay in the app
Request to save 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
06. A slight hang up
Working through legacy framework issues
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.
There was just one problem…
Pulse's legacy backend framework couldn't support drafting of content in the current format.
Trying to find solutions
I used a lightweight competitive analysis to evaluate how other cloud-based programs manage storing and saving content
The solution — Saving locally
I 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!
Testing the designs
07. A good start
Initial product rollout (v1 designs)
After 2 months of work, cross-collaboration, and research, we were able to ship this feature!
Shipped design flow (v1)
08. Fixing an unforeseen issue
Post-launch data led to a needed change
The initial rollout went well!
After the rollout of the updated portal, we saw a successful drop of over 10 minutes in the time users spent in content creation tasks
But a growing problem was discovered….
As usage increased, so did the amount of questions being deleted, but why?
Initial product rollout
Speaking to current users revealed that…
Users wanted to delist questions, but there was no option for this, so as a workaround, they ended up putting them into an external program and deleting the question in Pulse
09. Influencing roadmaps
Advocating for the user
Using data to influence the product roadmap
After discussing with my project PM and the engineering lead, I met with other lead stakeholders to find a way we could work to implement a "delisting" feature, noting that this problem could compound as our usage increased and as users did this more often and eventually cause users to rely on external programs to store content.
Mapping product impacts
After making a case for this new feature, it was successfully added to the roadmap!
From here I was able to work and plan with other designers to map downstream effects in other parts of Pulse and create the correct messaging and edge cases to cover what happens when content is deactivated.
10. The grand finale
Showcasing final design updates
After collaborating with engineering, product, and designers of other product areas, the final design based on the updated roadmap was rolled out!
Updates for content deactivation
Key impacts
Over 50%
Decrease in time-on-task
17%
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 realized my usability test plan was affected by tunnel vision. I focused too much on confirming narrow assumptions, which kept me from seeing how users naturally moved through the workflow. A more open approach would have revealed unexpected behaviors and surfaced the need for disabling content earlier.
Valuable Lessons 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.
Framing problems in a different lens for different stakeholders can go along way in helping to get buy in. For example in this project, I approached a new user pain point of having to use a work around to hide question content as a long-term business problem that could grow quickly and scare off current or future customers.
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