Refining Pulse's template Content Portal
Providing a more efficient and centralized experience to boost key customer adoption
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
A tough-to-change legacy backend framework
Keeping the design familiar while supporting a different type of content - Expand HERE
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 root of the problem
Users were spending extra time retrieving the custom questions they wrote in survey templates. Without a centralized place to go, users relied on external content programs or had to search through existing templates.
This caused slow task completion times and risked higher user frustration with a negative impact on long-term use and adoption.
How the journey faltered under the Existing 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 hard 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.
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 hypotheses around centralizing and streamlining survey content access for users. These 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 held weekly syncs with the project PM and engineering team to discuss ideas and understand feasibility, scalability, and use of existing patterns.
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. 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.
As I reviewed our test findings with 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 involving 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 or MSFT Word
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/or completely deleting them
08. Rerouting…
Updates to the product roadmap
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.
Successful negotiation
After making a case for this new feature by highlighting key business impacts, it was successfully added to the roadmap! This 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 collaborate with engineering, product, and designers of other product areas, the final design based on the updated roadmap 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
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
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.
