↓ Experience Principles
Unbounce 2017

 

These are five experiential principles of the current Unbounce user derived from our ethnographic field studies. These are shared universal guideposts you and your team can use to inform anything you create that a user will interact with. They will evolve with our ongoing research.

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The Problem

At this point in time in 2017, Unbounce was a landing page platform that enabled marketers to build, publish and test landing pages without IT. We didn't have a north star. We needed to understand through what lens customers evaluate capabilities of our product. We lacked a definition to guide us towards the fundamental needs of our users within Unbounce.

Team
Topp Brocales (product designer)
Sarah Gillis (product designer)
Denise Villanueva (product designer)
Denis Suhopoljac (design director)
Alecia Morris (ux director)
Ricky Knight (ux manager)

 

Activities
Interviews
Ethnography Study
Affinity Mapping
Principles Design
User Research

 

The Approach

In 2017 we conducted an extensive ethnography study with Unbounce customers. This enabled us to understand marketers needs and what they needed from the Unbounce landing page builder. We discovered patterns and insights into what our users do on a daily basis and in what context our tool is used. This was our first big user research initiative and it helped us understand user behaviour. We interviewed and observed 22 participants as part of our study. The study generated 500 valuable data points based on customers and non-customers from small to medium sized businesses that spanned several industries.

This unlocked an opportunity to create participant posters that framed and humanized the data for the organization. We classified what people these marketers worked with, what tools they used and what their workflows looked like. We affinity mapped pains, gains and observations in the appropriate context. 

Please Note: Due to the sensitive nature of this content and its participants this version of the experience principles uses stock photography and some names have been altered, while company names have been redacted.

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Principle 01

Let Me Collaborate

Let Me Collaborate

Let Me Collaborate

I want to be able to communicate, collaborate and iterate with my team and the people I work for. I need to understand what has changed and what I still need to finish. I need efficient methods to translate feedback into real changes to drive better conversion and increase client satisfaction. I should be supported in this regardless of my skillset and my team’s capabilities.

I want to be able to communicate, collaborate and iterate with my team and the people I work for. I need to understand what has changed and what I still need to finish. I need efficient methods to translate feedback into real changes to drive better conversion and increase client satisfaction. I should be supported in this regardless of my skillset and my team’s capabilities.

“I connect with everyone all the time.”

“I connect with everyone all the time.”

“I connect with everyone all the time.”

“I connect with everyone all the time.”

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Erika

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Erika

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Erika

Lead Marketing Designer, ██████

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Unbounce Study Participant
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About Erika

Erika is the Lead Marketing Designer for an Israel-based marketing company called ████. She and her team work out of a satellite office in the USA dealing with the company’s many American clients. In addition to design work, Erika spends her days coordinating with Israel and her own team of in-house designers and external freelancers, as well as managing their clients directly.

Opportunity Story
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Support my interactions with stakeholders

When a new project kicks off, Erika creates a quick design within Unbounce and then publishes the page to a test site. She then sends a link to her clients for initial feedback. Her project manager then gathers all feedback from the client via email or phone and enters it manually into a Google document. Erika reviews the document and then reaches out to her designers via email or Google Hangouts to go over the changes. Erika uses over five tools and a few hacks to facilitate weekly feedback and discussions with her team and stakeholders.

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“If I had to build a page from scratch I wouldn’t know where to start.”

“If I had to build a page from scratch I wouldn’t know where to start.”

“If I had to build a page from scratch I wouldn’t know where to start.”

“If I had to build a page from scratch I wouldn’t know where to start.”

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Adam

Digital Marketing Manager, ██

Unbounce Study Participant
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About Adam

About Adam

Adam is the digital marketing manager for ██, a non-profit organization that allows people to lend money to low-income entrepreneurs and students in over 80 countries. He is one of 300 employees worldwide and works out of the New York office. Adam’s primary focus is maximizing his ad spend while running ad campaigns on search, Facebook and building partnership programs.

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Opportunity Story
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Support the way my team and I works

Support the way my team and I works

In the ideal world, both Adam and other marketers like him, could run campaigns on their own. He is increasingly frustrated by the bottleneck of design. This severely limits his reponse time when pushing a campaign live. Adam feels all a marketer requires are templates and graphic assets for specific campaigns. Adam is not a designer and building a page from scratch is not an option for him. He envisions a future where the ██ brand DNA is accessible and sharable between marketers and designers in one place inside Unbounce.

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Principle 02

Save Me Time

Save Me Time

Save Me Time

I never have enough time to get through my tasks within a given day. Anything I use in my marketing stack must respect my time, and should seek to constantly increase my efficiency. The time I save will be reallocated toward other strategic priorities beyond developing or optimizing content.

I never have enough time to get through my tasks within a given day. Anything I use in my marketing stack must respect my time, and should seek to constantly increase my efficiency. The time I save will be reallocated toward other strategic priorities beyond developing or optimizing content.

“Without being able to complete a proper data export and select a specific date-range . . . reporting is useless to us.”

“Without being able to complete a proper data export and select a specific date-range . . . reporting is useless to us.”

“Without being able to complete a proper data export and select a specific date-range . . . reporting is useless to us.”

“Without being able to complete a proper data export and select a specific date-range . . . reporting is useless to us.”

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Jillian

Director of Web Analytics, ██████

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Unbounce Study Participant
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About Jillian

Jillian is a no nonsense East Coaster and the Director of Web Analytics at ██████, an online marketplace that provides an outlet for buyers and sellers of tickets to live entertainment events. She has a lot on her plate at all times, coordinating the efforts of the SEO, Graphics and PPC teams to ensure the pages they publish are up to par. As the admin on the Unbounce account, Jillian is often managing everything for the ten users that use their account.

Opportunity Story
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Show what’s important to me when I need it

She finds herself frustrated when she has to dig around to do this rather than being able to go to a higher level to update things like settings and manage pages. Due to the constant time crunch and having to juggle so many things at once, Jillian feels it is very important to be able to easily access what is most important to her when she needs it.

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“I didn’t start my own business to work more.”

“I didn’t start my own business to work more.”

“I didn’t start my own business to work more.”

“I didn’t start my own business to work more.”

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Jan

Marketing Partner, ███ ████

Unbounce Study Participant
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About Jan

Jan is the marketing partner at ███ ████. He is a generalist who tends to do everything from setting up campaigns, managing teams, copywriting and designing landing pages. Currently his focus is getting more sales so he’s always on the go. He recently hired a team of account managers and salespeople to support him with that effort. They mostly work remote so he also hired a virtual assistant to help keep him on track.

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Opportunity Story
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Reduce my tasks

Jan creates more landing pages than his competition. He also relies on third party tools and tracks everything since one lead can make up his entire year. To further enable his team, he records his actions and sends them out to replicate for other clients. He also duplicates existing pages and even created a master template to copy from. He aims to completely transition from client services to sales by delegating more of his responsibilities to the team. He values the importance of empowering his team to help grow his business.

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Principle 03

Give Me Confidence

Give Me Confidence

I want to leverage information to the best of my ability and always have immediate access to relevant insights to drive my business forward. I need to be trusted by those I work with as an expert, so the data I use must be accurate and true. To fully understand how my tactics are doing, I need to be able to see the big picture or zoom in on the tiny details.

“Campaigns take a long time; there’s a lot of manual work.”

“Campaigns take a long time; there’s a lot of manual work.”

“Campaigns take a long time; there’s a lot of manual work.”

“Campaigns take a long time; there’s a lot of manual work.”

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Lauren

Director of Marketing, ███ ████ ████

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Unbounce Study Participant
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Unbounce Study Participant
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About Lauren

Lauren is the Director of Marketing of ███ ████ ████, a small company based in the USA. Her job includes managing 47 franchisees and helping them set up their own brands. On top of that, she is also in charge of their company website. She sends personalized emails to the franchisees, asking her developer to add tracking where necessary. She does a lot of manual work by doing quality checks on brand consistency, messaging, and conversion tracking.

Opportunity Story
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Help me reduce my mistakes

She feels like this is extremely tedious and a waste of time. She recently hired an assistant to help her with these manual tasks. With this new hire, she now spends her day trying to connect her lead integrations to the tools she prefers. Lauren is attracted to tools that help her grow her partnerships by connecting the integrations reliably. She needs a bird’s eye view of everything in the system so that she can quickly execute what needs to be done. She strongly feels that she can make these updates on her own, but lacks tools that she trusts.

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“I don’t get any alerts from Unbounce on how pages are performing or if a variant won – I have to manually check and manually promote the winner to champion.”

“I don’t get any alerts from Unbounce on how pages are performing or if a variant won – I have to manually check and manually promote the winner to champion.”

“I don’t get any alerts from Unbounce on how pages are performing or if a variant won – I have to manually check and manually promote the winner to champion.”

“I don’t get any alerts from Unbounce on how pages are performing or if a variant won – I have to manually check and manually promote the winner to champion.”

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Zach

Digital Marketing Analyst, ██████

Unbounce Study Participant
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About Zach

As the Digital Marketing Analyst for a small European-based agency, Zach is responsible for everything from data analysis, opportunity profiling, new customer acquisition, affiliate marketing and paid search. Zach uses Unbounce to promote new products with coupon offers baked into the landing pages, and then monitors their traffic behavior.

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Opportunity Story
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Tell me how I'm doing

As the campaigns run, he is testing different copy, layouts and offers. He spends so much of his time checking to see how pages are performing or if a variant won. Once he has a winner, he has to manually go in and promote the winner to champion so that he gets more eyeballs on the best page.  He is constantly testing, both tools and campaigns, and wants to know when things are going well, and when they are not.

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Principle 04

Give Me Control

I need complete control when the situation calls for it. If there are requirements I must meet and there’s no out of the box solution available, then I need a way to do it myself. I need to be empowered to break apart, customize or build upon what’s on offer as often as necessary.

“We always keep a main template for specific funnels and duplicate it for other clients.”

“We always keep a main template for specific funnels and duplicate it for other clients.”

“We always keep a main template for specific funnels and duplicate it for other clients.”

“We always keep a main template for specific funnels and duplicate it for other clients.”

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Natalie

Lead Visual Designer, ████ ███

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Unbounce Study Participant
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About Natalie

Natalie works for ████ ███, a marketing agency in New York. She is always multi-tasking and short on time. As the lead visual designer, she is constantly switching context when it comes to projects. She is managing other designers, leading quality control and getting her hands dirty by building and designing landing pages for campaigns. Simultaneously editing landing pages while working with other designers often results in designers overwriting each other's changes.

Opportunity Story
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Help me achieve my vision

The biggest time consuming obstacle is porting over layouts from design applications to Unbounce. Plagued by shortcomings of fine tuned controls, she resorts to a trial and error in conjunction with tricks or hacks to achieve her final vision. In Natalie's ideal world, she would easily achieve pixel perfection and she wouldn’t have to duplicate work because she believes her time is too valuable to waste.

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Principle 05

Plays Well With Others

The amount of tools I use is always changing. I need my data to be transferrable and integrations current and available so I’m never obstructed. Everything in my marketing stack has to work together in order for me to be the most effective.

“Our tech tool stack is a strategy in itself”

“Our tech tool stack is a strategy in itself”

“Our tech tool stack is a strategy in itself”

“Our tech tool stack is a strategy in itself”

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Aalap

Co-founder, ███

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Unbounce Study Participant
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About Aalap

Aalap is a co-founder of ███, a small digital marketing agency, where he does most of the creative strategy for their clients. As an agency owner, he prides himself with choosing the best tools for his clients. For him, his tech tool stack in itself is a strategy.

Opportunity Story
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Fit my ecosystem

In his day to day, he finds it difficult to move from one tool to another since most of them don’t work well together. He spends a good amount of time trying to set each one up and connect pages for his clients. As his clients are becoming bigger, he’s seeing a rapid growth in his tool ecosystem.

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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 future development.
  • 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.
  • Continued to deliver and ship product value for customers and enable them to “build, publish and test landing pages without IT”.

— Denis Suhopoljac
Design Leadership @Asana
Previously @unbounce
Footy Fanatic. Metal nostalgic \m/
Born in Bosnia. Raised in Germany. Living in Canada.

— Contact
d[at]heysuho.com