Melissa Carmichael - Design Leadership

Company: SurveyMonkey
Role: Product Design Lead
Released: 2017

Summary

SurveyMonkey Audience is the Market Research business unit, built on a dual marketplace supply & demand model: the Market Researcher (survey creator) purchases an Audience Panel to collect survey answers, and in turn, we source and supply panelists (survey takers) to answer the surveys through our two-panel platforms - SurveyMonkey Contribute and SurveyMonkey Rewards.

Challenge

The experience where users configure their panel was outdated, had many restrictions and needed usability and task flow optimization. Through metrics, we were able to establish that not only were errors thrown quite frequently, but also about two-thirds of users were single purchases only, which the difficulty of the purchase likely being a contributing factor. While we wanted to initially focus on improving the First Time User experience, our hypothesis was that by improving the experience we could retain more users to purchase a second panel for subsequent projects.

Discovery Phase

Over the course of two quarters, I lead the Audience team through the redesign of the Audience Panel purchase experience with a user-centered and design-first approach to defining the requirements. All the features and functionality were first researched and validated with users, then prioritized with input from the team. The discovery activities served a dual purpose; I was brand new to the team, so it allowed me to go on a listening tour to get to know the cross-functional team members and onboard me to the Market Research space.

These activities included:

• Reviewed existing qualitative user research and usage data
• Conducted 1:1 interviews with our 8-member Customer Service team and 6-member cross-functional product team to gather known user pain points, followed by collating the inputs, and sharing out for team alignment
• Competitive research for feature parity and secondary research data from customer reviews
• Facilitated a cross-functional ideation session with Engineering, Product Managers, Marketing, CS, and Content Strategy, grounded by personas and use cases (shown above)

Problem Statements

We focused on what was obtainable within a quarter's effort for design & engineering and narrowed in on the First Time User experience, but explored some of the areas below.

• How might we increase conversion of the purchase experience?
• How might we build trust, which enables novice users with confidence in their choices?
• How might we get First Time Users up and running successfully?
• How might we streamline the configuration for our expert users?

Concept Design Phase

I explored a variety of approaches to the page redesgin, and after 4 rounds of rapid concept evaluation through customer interviews, I presented my suggestions for key changes, which were then discussed with PM & Engineering to align on the scope and finalize the requirements. These redesigned elements were:

• A stepped process, which is clearer to the novice users as to “what they should do” first, second, and third, but not locking users into a forced linear path
• Elevate key demographics that had parent/child dependencies and ones that users felt were priority items
• Clearer breakdown of costs (unit-based & overall project)
• Easier modifications of adding & removing items, for budget-conscious users
• Improved clarity in language & instructions for complex tasks, such as estimating IR (Incidence Rate)

Some quotes from concept feedback sessions:
"First impressions... it's more modern looking. The old page had a feeling of clunkiness and datedness."
"Nice to start with Demographics selection, since that's the item that's going to drive a lot of other steps."

Results

We initially built and released the redesigned purchase experience as an A/B test, and after pushing the new experience to production, we saw a 12.6% lift in AOV, plus an additional 2.3% conversion rate in first-time purchases. This was estimated to contribute over $1 million in incremental YoY revenue to the Audience business. As I transitioned off the team, I handed over the remaining P2-P3 prioritized feature list, which was used as a playbook for additional optimizations.