↓ Experience Principles
Unbounce 2020
Experience principles are the fundamental needs of the user within our application. Users evaluate all capabilities of our product through these dimensions. Interactions or experiences that utilize these Principles will be considered of high value to the user. They guide us towards the ideal experience for anything we build.
The Problem
Unbounce is a conversion intelligence platform that enables marketers to quickly create and optimize campaigns. The challenges we faced was that we lacked a proper definition to guide us towards what the ideal experience looks like for our customers. We also lacked a clear definition of what our primary customer problems were. It’s hard to establish what projects we take on, and where to focus our attention without it. Our goal was to create purposeful and consistent experiences for our customers.
Team
Denis Suhopoljac (design director)
Alecia Morris (director of ux)
Ricky Knight (ux manager)
Sarah Gillis (senior product designer)
Shawna Jones (senior product designer)
Rebecca Preston (product designer)
Activities
Interviews
Ethnography Study
Data Analysis
Affinity Mapping
Principles Design
User Research
The Approach
The UX team conducted an Ethnographic study in the summer of 2019. We interviewed and observed 22 participants as part of our study. The study generated 2550 data points based on customers and non-customers from our target segments in saas, ecommerce and agency. This knowledge was rounded off with prior usability studies, customer interviews and concept tests.
All of this data allowed us to generate deep insights into motivations, behaviours and pain points for our users. It helped us fully frame situations our users would be facing in their day to day. Our experience principles had dramatically shifted to three core needs: Save Me Time, Help Me See Opportunity and Work With My Tools.
SAVE ME TIME
“ I never have enough time to get through my daily tasks. Any tool I use must respect my time and increase my efficiency so I can better focus my efforts on other priorities.”
↓ Situations They Are Facing
- Analyzing data is difficult + time consuming (e.x. Trying to figure out why someone dropped off after ad click.
- They feel like there is no time to be proactive with data
- It’s challenging to get content (images, design, copy) ready quickly
- “Why don’t you do the design for us? You know what converts?”
- “Landing pages are challenging. Getting it rolled out it takes forever. Whenever design is involved scope gets out of control.”
- “ My challenge with the page was creation. I'm not a designer so it was hard for me to make it look nice.”
↓ How To Apply This Principle
- Customers want us to do the “grunt work” for them
- Look for ways to automate tasks for users
- Help users learn faster
HELP ME SEE OPPORTUNITY
“ Understanding my data is difficult. I need to see opportunities when they surface and be able to act. I need to understand my marketing funnel, who my best customers are, and I need to know more than first and last touch.”
↓ Situations They Are Facing
- Analyzing data is difficult + time consuming (currently a manual process of going from touchpoint to touchpoint & calculated manually in excel)
- "[Attribution] is so freaking complex it's not even funny.”
- Lack of visibility into what is really working makes it hard to know where to focus marketing efforts.
- Hard to iterate & work quickly, when they have to slow down to analyze data.
↓ How To Apply This Principle
- Don’t deliver “data puke”. Get them as far through the (data-> information -> insights -> knowledge) model as possible.
- Show them where they should focus their energy
- Help them understand their customers & get more of the good ones (purchasing / conversion behavior, marketing funnel, attribution)
- Make them a better marketer
WORK WITH MY TOOLS
“ I need my data to be portable and my integrations current so I’m never obstructed. Everything in my marketing stack is my strategy and everything has to work together so I can be the most effective.”
↓ Situations They Are Facing
- Our campaign started with Instagram and FB ads that lead to the Landing Page. Then the customer gets a brochure via mailchimp, then a followup email a few days later, then Pipedrive reminds us to follow up.”
- Our top pains with data are: aggregating data from multiple sources and finding the right attribution
- Each participant uses between 10 - 20 tools to get their job done
↓ How To Apply This Principle
- Work nicely with their Ad platforms, email platforms & CRMs
- Ensure the way we structure our data & APIs enables our customers to get what they need without frustration
- Make the experience seamless when connecting with other tools.
CUSTOMER PROBLEMS
Customer problems dictate what projects we take on, and where to focus our attention.There are three main customer issues that we have observed and recorded through our studies:
How do I create high converting content?
Our customers are unsure why their content and audience converts.
How do I compare
to others?
Our users don’t know how they compare to others in their industry and aren’t confident in where they should focus their time.
How do I increase ROI with my existing budget?
They are unaware how to convert more “good customers” or how to grow their conversions.
The Outcome
- Alignment with PM, Engineering and Revenue teams on what is valuable to our users.
- Experience principles became the fundamental needs of our users within our application and our north star for the business.
- Every interaction or experience we created had to take these experience principles into consideration, in order for it to be considered of value to the user.
- Redefined our core customer problems and propelled the business beyond its original mission “build, publish and test landing pages without IT”.