From Vision to Reality
Designing A Navigable Path To Enterprise Success
Company
Role
Senior Director
Team
Total Team: 5
Overview
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SurveyMonkey sought to claim more market share in the enterprise space by improving its user experience for large organizations.
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Grounded in research and customer feedback, the design team created a visiontype that simplified the survey journey and improved collaboration tools.
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The first release from the visiontype, a cleaner, more intuitive homepage, drove a 12% increase in survey launches.
How did the design team shape a compelling vision for enhancing SurveyMonkey’s capabilities, and deliver a better experience start point?
Context
In 2020, strategic planning was focused on making a strong move up-market to capture more enterprise revenue. SurveyMonkey has been a beloved brand for 20 years, and was known for its ease of use and quick-start capabilities. To continue to grow, the business wanted to do more to engage enterprise customers, and claim share from the top competitor. It’s important to note that SurveyMonkey had been in the Enterprise space since 2013 by releasing a dedicated Enterprise solution, including seat management.
It’s also interesting to note, SurveyMonkey focused on a continuous improvement approach, instead of step-change experience shifts after 2009, which meant they hadn't released major changes to the core experience for a while.
In service of the company's goal to move up-market, I was asked to lead the creation of a visiontype (read more here.) In short, a visiontype is an idealized future vision of the product. For our purposes, it was the future vision of an enterprise experience. I partnered closely with the head of research to deliver the vision, grounded in customer reality as part of Q4 critical objectives. Q4 is actually a short quarter, given holidays, so we only had about 2 months to complete foundational research, develop the visiontype, gather feedback from key stakeholders, and be ready to present to the executive team.
One other piece of context, customers had given feedback for some time that the current home page experience was cluttered, and they would prefer to be taken to the Project list page (which was just a list of all their projects). When you look at the home page available at that time, it includes cross-promotional content and growth levers, with little real estate dedicated to the customer’s projects.
Only one component on the account home page was customer created: their survey list, found in the middle of the page. The rest of the content was for cross-selling or provocations to move their projects forward.
Assumptions
To deliver a compelling visiontype, we needed to:
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Understand and solve for critical business objectives in senior leaders heads about what it meant to successfully move up market
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Ground our project in how medium to large businesses, with multiple seat accounts, conduct and present survey research
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Assess their work in several different contexts to identify any use-case specific needs
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Develop a clear narrative that demonstrates opportunities to serve research teams' needs better than the competition
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Craft a thoughtful and economical solution that still respects the complexity of designing and delivering survey research
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Inspire the executive staff AND the teams who would be part of translating the vision into actual experiences
Research & Explore
I partnered with the head of research to ground this project in customer needs and aspirations. Her team conducted 65 in-depth interviews with 40 companies, and the designers “rode along” by listening in and taking notes. This rich data provided many key insights and crucial patterns to fuel product design. Two key insights were the kindling for our design thinking:
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We defined 4 different personas engaged in research within customer businesses
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We refreshed the known customer journey with the level and kind of engagement in the survey creation, analysis, and insight sharing process. The darker circles are when collaboration was highest.
Personas
Journey
These insights highlighted the truth of any successful research initiative: projects are collaborative from the time research is requested and success criteria are established, to gathering feedback on the survey, through fielding the survey, to analysis and the most important moment, sharing those insights with the organization to drive action. No one in the enterprise survey market was solving effectively for teamwork and collaboration.
Early previews of key insights, as well as the designers participating in the interviews, jumpstarted our thinking to ensure we could draft our vision in time to gather feedback from key stakeholders. We needed survey team leadership's insight and buy-in to be successful.
Design: Crafting the Visiontype
Working with the manager on my team, we enlisted 5 designers to take on unique pieces of the overall customer journey. While designers started initial explorations, I drafted the outline for the narrative that would shape the vision. Our intention: tell a realistic story of the journey of research projects inside organizations. We described ways to easily and seamlessly facilitate research, based on the behaviors captured from our learnings. You can see below a sample of our vision: telling the story of a customer team working closely together at crucial moments when collaboration is most necessary:
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The product manager and a researcher work together to define the goals for needed research, and create a shared research project. A key pain point was defining shared goals and gathering feedback in a way that was easily translatable into a survey tool. This gave us a way to also offer the benefit of SurveyMonkey's 20 years of research insights by suggesting survey questions via our survey genius tool.
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The researcher develops a survey, explores sample results, and seeks feedback from PM and manager. In our solution, we addressed common collaboration paint points: the challenge of offering contextual feedback on surveys, setting appropriate expectations about survey outcomes with stakeholders, as well as planning for analysis with research managers.
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The researcher and other members of the team build a custom shareable insights dashboard. Arguably the most important moment in a research project is when results are shared. Our vision imagined a visual dashboard of insights, perfect for sharing with an executive audience. Individual insight blocks permitted diving into the data, and were portable to other reporting formats.
Account home page with current projects
Team members collaborating on survey goals and design
Survey preview enabling collaborative feedback
Preview of sample results prior to survey launch
Building visual insights dashboard using library
An easy-to-digest dashboard, shareable to entire company
And we hit the first milestone: The visiontype was presented to leadership as part of the end of quarter executive review, and was given the green light to begin translating this vision into reality.
Iteration: Refining to Release
The visiontype told a very rich story, with lots of opportunity to innovate within the current product, but it was a tall order to deliver and support other priorities without taking over the roadmap. To start with a win, we picked something that would offer true customer value, without too much technical complexity, given ongoing re-platforming efforts. Recent customer feedback pointed us to an optimal choice: improving the logged-in account home page would improve customer perception without tremendous technical effort.
Our visiontype version of the homepage was extremely simple so as to best describe the vision without distractions, but the concepts it presented were a solid foundation to build from. Iterations from the initial design focused on evolving the navigation, and developing the proposed project card system. We also wanted to improve on the existing survey genius element, which attempted to provide automated feedback from SurveyMonkey's knowledge bank to offer advice tailored for a customer's survey projects. We needed to hold place for cross-promotion, to support on goals of account expansion. And we wanted to embrace the SurveyMonkey sense of fun as part of the design.
This design (see first screen below) created 3 zones on the page:
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Navigation (for individual and team project access)
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Project space with all projects for a particular seat-holder on cards that communicated essential information about each project:
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the stage of development (draft, launched, closed)
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The fielding status (how it’s filling, any errors) of the project.
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Who the project was shared with/collaborators
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A communication zone on the right, to allow admins to post messages, allow SurveyMonkey to show their survey genius insights and recommendations AND communicate cross-sell opportunities.
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In addition, we wanted to use imagery and color to bring the design to life. (The image at the top of this case study page shows other ways we brought color and imagery in for accounts with no projects.)
First iteration of the home page, with an added focus of bringing life to the page
Feedback is essential to any design: we conducted two rounds of research to assess understandability and usability on a version of the above design. While visually lively, our prototype was too ornate and complicated to parse easily. We needed to streamline and refine our design for better scanning and ease of understanding. Below, you can see two iterations of a cleaner design, refined through rounds of research and experimentation.
Outcomes (and Learnings)
During my time at SurveyMonkey, we were able to craft a customer-centric future vision of the enterprise survey experience that mapped to leadership’s aspirations. This project gave the design team an opportunity to be a catalyst for new thinking and address some long standing customer complaints, which bolstered morale. We were able to hone and improve the design through usability study cycles to ensure a strong launch candidate, and continued to learn about the experience after launch.
I left SurveyMonkey before all experimentation was complete, but customer feedback showed this new logged-in home page was preferred to the old experience for clarity and ease of use. Usage data proved its effectiveness, as well: SurveyMonkey saw a 12% increase in survey launches compared with older versions, leading to better overall customer and business outcomes.