ZenBusiness - Product Design in Business Formation

Project Overview

Goal -

Lean into a customers unique educational needs to understand what they find useful and then provide them with a recommendation for content that meets these needs leveraging our education studio content (primarily articles).

Problem Statement -

90%+ of our customers say that have little to no experience of running a business and 1 in 5 of all dashboard visitors visit the education center. And while we offer a wealth of educational content, a customer 1.) needs to realize their needs and 2.) sift through the friction of 200+ articles to find the information that they’re looking for.

The Education Studio. Current experience (Q3 - 2023) at the XL breakpoint (desktop).

Project Responsibilities

Design Lead for the education portfolio under the Guidance Division

• Primary ask -

  • Working collaboratively with the Product Manager, Engineering Manager, and Program Manager, define a new vision for the education space that leans into customer need for business formation content and increase usage across the guidance platform.

• Secondary ask -

  • Find opportunities to increase the find-ability of education content so that customers can find the information that they need given their current need.

  • Enhance the overall UX/UI to shift how content is consumed while providing customers direction with what to do next.

• OKR prioritization for Q4

  • Daily Active Users (DAU)

    • Unique visitors to the Education Studio and Widget

  • Stories Analysis (not in scope for this work)

    • CTR, Completion and Takerate for all HVP stories

  • Article Views

    • Keep a pulse on the types of content our customers like

  • Average Articles User/Session

    • Improve the UX in order to maximize engagement

Timeline

• Q4 - 2023

  • Initial shift towards a more user-centric experience with prioritization, in the near term, of increasing usage (DAU/MAU).

• Q1 - 2024

  • Continue to build on the initial experience with a growing emphasis on greater personalization so that customers can find the educational content that they need when they need it.

Design Process

Empathize -

To achieve empathy for this particular set of users, I would pour over user research that had been conducted in the months prior to the start of this project to take inventory of what we know and where there could potentially be gaps in our understanding.

Personal anecdote -

From the research, it was clear, that there was a bias towards driving revenue (opportunities for product/service upsell - LTV) and less of an emphasis on solving for points of friction in the dashboard / business administration experience. As such, due to time constraints, I poured over any and all quantitative insights that would shed light on user engagement - usage patterns would help me better understand what pieces of content were being accessed and the frequency by which they were being used for a greater understanding of the underlying user need.

Define -

I would pull together a customer journey based on what was uncovered from research findings and quantitative data obtained from the platform through MixPanel.

Summary of the phases of the journey -

• Discovery - the stage at which a business idea is formed - prioritization on research (market fit and opportunity), and risk.

• Activation - the individual understands the need and sets out to find a platform to complete that task - “I don’t know what I don’t know”.

• Retention - as the business matures, challenges of scale, efficiencies, finances, funding, etc. continue to rise. The potential to provide guidance and education is greatest here.

Ideate -

As I considered the current dashboard experience for the education portfolio (mentioned above), I would leverage the upfront work in the empathize and define stages by laying out an iterative phased approach towards a solution. The new user flow highlights the opportunities the new layout would introduce both in terms of discoverability for content and guidance on what to prioritize as a new customer who has recently formed their business.

Design -

Wireframes would help the group visualize, at a high level, any proposed updates to layout, the placement and organization of content, highlight UX improvements, and the use of visual hierarchy to direct the users focus to areas of varying levels of importance.

Phase 1 for Q4 (2023)

Highlights -

1. The new layout would focus on content discoverability to provide clarity and direction while iteratively shifting the experience in meaningful ways towards greater interaction (DAU/MAU).

   1. Jakob’s Law - a user preference, and expectation, for similarly functioning patterns and interactions across sites and platforms

      • Familiar patterns for “daily streak”, “read count”, and “series completed” that aim, through gamification, to increase the probability of usage across the edu platform

   2. Hick’s Law - decreasing the time it takes for a user to make a decision

      • Greatly simplifying the number of articles being shown on screen and, in doing so, decreasing the cognitive load and time it takes to make a decision on where to go next

   3. Miller’s Law - minimizing the need for the user to keep multiple items in working memory

      • In chunking in the layout, we help users understand underlying relationships and hierarchy by grouping content into distinctive modules

2. We’d carry over aspects of the original layout to a new “library” tab for users that prefer to navigate content using the existing layout and to enable efficiencies in delivering the iterative solution in Q4

Personal anecdote -

Wireframes were extremely helpful in aligning stakeholders (program manager, product manager and director). This allowed me to iterate with the edu team quickly and focused our efforts on areas of placement, layout, and hierarchy to provide direction.

When comparing features that I wanted to introduce for this first phase of work to what was determined as viable for Q4, the PM had determined that we needed to scale back the work in order to get the redesign designed and developed for the current quarter.

This meant…

1. We would scale back the level of personalization -

   1. Avatar

   2. Series completed stat

2. Recommended topics would be pushed to Q4 due to the work required to tag our content in the backend AND create the results page.

3. Workshop videos was a dependency on the marketing team that would not be ready for Q4.

4. Product and service

Phase 2 for Q1 (2024)

Highlights -

1. Leaning more into the shift that was begun in Phase 1, we would scale up our functionality in Phase 2.

   1. “Where do I start?” - a direct response to the feedback of, “I don’t know what I don’t know”

      • A guided approach to filtering mixed media content through a questionnaire flow that would feed those responses into a LLM (ChatGPT) trained on edu content

   2. “I need to create” -

      • “Hand holding” for those customers needing additional assistance in creating all important documents related to their business

   3. Workshops -

      • Topical workshop content in easily consumable video form

   4. “Learn how to use our products” -

      • Content that would teach customers how to use certain products across the platform

   5. Recommended topics -

      • Topical filters that would rely on new tags of associated content in our API to surface content in the front-end

2. The library page would begin to resemble more of a results page while leveraging existing card patterns for ease of delivery

   1. Filters

   2. Search

Entry (Ideation)

After several rounds of discussions with stakeholders and reviews with product design peers, I would create high-fidelity designs to align, what was initially proposed as wires, our designs with our libraries and, in doing so, create a clearer vision for phase 1.

Figma prototypes -

Testing -

For the next step, I would work with the product manager to come up with a strategy for testing the new design, primarily through an A/B test using LaunchDarkly flags in production, to gauge general sentiment using the existing design as the ‘control’ and the newly proposed designs for phase 1 as the ‘variable’. This would give us a sense of user sentiment with actual ZenBusiness customers.

Hypothesis’s

1. We will see a decrease in the number for support calls (cost center).

2. We will see less churn in our numbers for all or some subscription packages.

3. Conversely, we will see an uptick in upsells for ZB products/services.

4. We will also see an uptick in DAU (and conversely MAU) for education with primary drivers being user metrics and clearer guidance.

Outcomes -

• TBD*

*My role was, unfortunately, impacted as a result of layoffs from the company in November 2023.

Summary -

Challenges

• LTV in the short-term continued to be the primary focus for the company which necessitated cross-promotion of products/services in education.

• Continued pressures on LTV in Q3 led to layoffs and the dissolution of the education team at the start of Q4.

Learnings

• Continue to be flexible in adapting design processes to prioritize speed in delivery.

Takeaways

• Unfortunate that this team and its mission was disbanded.