Enterprise Website | Lead UX Research
Engaging online Community members 20.2% more after a full site redesign
Company Info
Fortune Global 50 Manufacturing Software Company — Enterprise | $5B+ revenue
Role
UX Research & Design Lead
Team
1 Community Strategist, 1 Program Manager, 2 Platform Managers, 4 Vendor Consultants, 1 Software Developer
Duration
Incremental updates over 18 months
Project Overview
The online community lost an estimated 30% of their members during migration to a new platform, which was harming their transition to being fully SaaS-based.
My work on their online Community‘s onboarding experience and findability increased member engagement and retention by an estimated 20.2%, and growth to 55K unique user sign ups for FY23. The team’s overall goal was to increase membership and engagement, and they brought me in to identify and challenge stakeholder assumptions that might hinder customer experiences and business goals.
Discovery Research
I evaluated the online community to identify opportunities for improvement in the overall architecture of the platform and the findability of answers to customers’ questions—their main purpose for visiting the community.
Community Heuristic Evaluation First Impressions of the site prior to research and redesign
Community Heuristic Evaluation First Impressions. It's important to point out what's already good, in addition to what can be improved.
Community Heuristic Evaluation - The Profile Creation Flow for a New Member was disjointed and irrelevant to members' needs.
Initial Redesign & Validation
Customers complained that they couldn’t find the information they needed on the community forums.
I redesigned the community so it would be in compliance with company brand, redesigned the onboarding experience, and more intuitive findability in the forums which resulted in increased engagement and daily user visits. Speaking to actual customers is vital to the success of any product so over the course of my two years on the project, I performed two sets of customer interviews, one for each Problem Statement.
Customer Interview Goal
“How do Community members want to find information and connect with others in the Community?”
Research Goal #1
Identify how easy or difficult it is for customers to find relevant resources on the Community.
Initial Hypothesis
The sign up process for the Community is so confusing and tedious that new members don’t want to complete the steps, resulting in not knowing how to use the site.
Finding
Confirmed: New members don’t want to be interrupted by signing up when all they want is to ask a question.
Existing members experienced the same in the beginning and now are unaware of several features available to them.
Research Goal #2
Pinpoint opportunities of improvement for new and existing members’ introduction to the online community.
Initial Hypothesis
Visitors do not want to spend a long time looking for answers.
Finding
Confirmed: “I just want to find answers fast. I need answers in minutes. Anything else is not fast.” – P2
Prototypes
I designed a series of onboarding options to update community members of new features for when things change which resulted in more questions being answered, and more active and engaged community members.
Onboarding Options - Info Alert, Walkthrough, Tour Modal, Release Notes
Small Option - For presenting an update that doesn't greatly affect the customer's flow
Medium Option - For presenting a single update that will greatly improve the customer's experience
Large Option - For presenting high value updates and big changes
Stakeholder Interviews
Gently challenging stakeholders’ assumptions about their understanding of community members revealed areas of alignment and misalignment within the team and built trust for us all.
Stakeholder responses were clustered to find common themes
* Colours are associated with the Stakeholder interviewed. Lines indicate related clusters of common themes.
Stakeholder themes were recorded and shared out in a Rainbow Chart
Collaboration
I included stakeholders early and often throughout the entire research and design process which built rapport and established community within the team.
My communication style including stakeholders on a series of interviews.
My communication style informing an executive stakeholder on various research insights and design demo.
Results / Impact
o Members engaged with community features 20.2% more in Q2 and 12.53% more in Q3.
o More questions were answered in the forums, an increased 7% in FY 23 Q2 and 5.6% in Q3.
o Number of active community members increased from 3.32% in FY23 Q2 to 13.07% in Q3.
o 55,000 new member signups.
Constraints & Limitations
What would I do differently?
When I joined the Community team, our sole software developer was highly impacted by other work. Recently appointed executive leadership saw the value in improving the Community’s Customer Experience, but allocation of resources was slow so that implementation of the builds did not occur for several months after deliverable hand-off. This caused severe delays in design iterations and usability testing.
We did the best we could with the resources we had, of course.
With more resources, I could have more quickly cycled through research methodologies.
I would have liked to have interviewed 3-5 Super Users and 3-5 Regular Members, and
To validate and update the Hypothesis-Led Customer Journey Maps (not shown in this case study).