Re-engaging the new users, through building a walkthrough

Summary

Overview

Tackled low user engagement by redesigning the deal room creation process within the web application to improve customer satisfaction and reduce churn.

Company

emlen

Project

B2B, SaaS

My role

Design Lead

Product

Web App

Challenges

The primary challenge was the low adoption rate of the deal room creation feature, crucial for the platform, resulting in potential contract terminations by companies.

Solution

A comprehensive redesign of the user interface and workflow was undertaken, focusing on clarifying multiple creation paths and enhancing usability for all user types, particularly new users who missed initial onboarding.

Methods

Figma for design and prototyping.
Behavioral analysis on Pendo.
User interviews and iterative usability tests.
Agile project management to ensure quick iterations based on user feedback.

Result

The redesign resulted in a 30% increase in customer satisfaction, a 20% increase in product adoption per customer, and an 80% decrease in churn rate.

Situation

Research

Solution

Results

The Situation

Emlen was on a growth mission, but at the same time was facing revenue churn. Based on an initial investigation from the Customer Success team, one of the main reasons was unhappy customers, which led to the below problem statement:

"Less than 50% of the average users were creating deal rooms (the main function of the product), although their company was paying for their seats. In the long run, due to the low adoption rate, the companies decided to terminate their contracts"

Research

On the first contact with the CS lead, and being present on 6 onboarding calls for new customers, I got more clear vision regarding the onboarding process.

Note: In this case study, deal rooms are equal to destinations, which is the internal name of a deal room on emlen.io

Based on my observations, the new users were taught to create deal rooms through a specific flow:

Select/upload content
Create a deal room with the selection
Search and add contacts

But in our product, the users could also create deal rooms from 2 other flows, which weren't highlighted as the main flow in the onboarding calls. All of the 3 flows to create a deal room are shown in the image below:

On the first contact with the CS lead, and being present on 6 onboarding calls for new customers, I got more clear vision regarding the onboarding process.

Note: In this case study, deal rooms are equal to destinations, which is the internal name of a deal room on emlen.io

Based on my observations, the new users were taught to create deal rooms through a specific flow:

Select/upload content
Create a deal room with the selection
Search and add contacts

On the first contact with the CS lead, and being present on 6 onboarding calls for new customers, I got more clear vision regarding the onboarding process.

Note: In this case study, deal rooms are equal to destinations, which is the internal name of a deal room on emlen.io

Based on my observations, the new users were taught to create deal rooms through a specific flow:

Select/upload content
Create a deal room with the selection
Search and add contacts

In separate internal calls with 10 stakeholders in the CS, Product, and Business teams, I asked about their assumptions regarding the adoption of each of these 3 flows by our customers. The average percentage was as follows:

Content hub: 60%
Directly: 30%
Contacts: 10%

Content hub was rated as the highest since the team believed that the customers are taught to use that flow.

Behavioral analysis

To get real insights about the adoption of the "Create Deal Rooms" feature, I performed a behavioral analysis on Pendo, our analytics tool. To our surprise, the results were completely different from the assumption:

Content hub: 20%
Directly: 18%
Contacts: 30%
Lost users: 29%

Lost users were the ones who jumped from one flow to another and creating deal room conversion rate for them was almost equal to zero!

User interviews

To get insights into the reason for such a significant difference in our assumptions and the actual user behavior, I conducted interviews with 13 real users. I invited customers based on their behavior in creating deal rooms. I needed to know the answer to the following questions:

Why the majority of the users are creating deal rooms from the contacts page?
Why creating deal rooms from the content hub is 1/3 of the expectation?
Which user types are creating deal rooms directly from the top app bar?
Why 29% of the users are lost?

The findings were interesting:

The majority of users created deal rooms from the contacts page, because:
- Based on their experience with CRMs, which is starting main actions from contacts

The content hub flow was less than expected because:
- Many of the users didn't attend the onboarding calls.

Mostly, the power users create deal rooms directly. The users who know the exact content, for specific contacts.

The findings were interesting:

The majority of users created deal rooms from the contacts page, because:
- Based on their experience with CRMs, which is starting main actions from contacts

The content hub flow was less than expected because:
- Many of the users didn't attend the onboarding calls.

Mostly, the power users create deal rooms directly. The users who know the exact content, for specific contacts.

The findings were interesting:

The majority of users created deal rooms from the contacts page, because:
- Based on their experience with CRMs, which is starting main actions from contacts

The content hub flow was less than expected because:
- Many of the users didn't attend the onboarding calls.

Mostly, the power users create deal rooms directly. The users who know the exact content, for specific contacts.

The lost users

After finding out that 29% of the users are lost in the create deal room flow, I thought that maybe if we solve the problem for these users, we could solve the adoption problem. Interviewing with this segment of users, gave me interesting insights:

The lost users were new users who didn't attend the onboarding calls. The reasons for getting lost in the flows were as follows:

Not finding the CTA to create a deal room from the contacts page and content hub page
Not knowing the logical steps to create a deal room
Looking for the CTA to create a deal room on the wrong page: on the deals page, in which every deal room was listed

The lost users were new users who didn't attend the onboarding calls. The reasons for getting lost in the flows were as follows:

Not finding the CTA to create a deal room from the contacts page and content hub page
Not knowing the logical steps to create a deal room
Looking for the CTA to create a deal room on the wrong page: on the deals page, in which every deal room was listed

The lost users were new users who didn't attend the onboarding calls. The reasons for getting lost in the flows were as follows:

Not finding the CTA to create a deal room from the contacts page and content hub page
Not knowing the logical steps to create a deal room
Looking for the CTA to create a deal room on the wrong page: on the deals page, in which every deal room was listed

Solution

Having our users follow different paths wasn't a problem. The problem was the usability and clarity of those paths. In my interviews, the majority of the participants who were raising important issues were the lost users. I was confident that if I solved the adoption problem for these users, we could increase the customer satisfaction rate, and lower the churn rate. Therefore, we focused on the lost users.

Ideation

I led an ideation workshop with Product, Engineering, and Customer Success to come up with ideas for the problems we were facing for the lost users. 2 ideas that were quick to implement and had a high impact were selected. There was another idea of a walk-through, which had a high effort, but without it, one of the problems was remaining unsolved.

We planned to build the 2 low-effort ones as quick wins and hot fix in 1 sprint, and plan the high-effort one.

Designing: Bottom bar for selections

initially, if the users wanted to create a deal room from the content hub, they had to:

Select content items
Select "Create Destination" button on the top nav bar

Based on our findings in the research, the new users weren't aware of such feature. Therefore I designed a bottom bar which only showed up after selecting content items. One of the CTAs was "Create Destination".

Designing: Guide in the deals page

According to our findings in the research, the users were looking for the CTA to create a deal room in the deals page. To avoid the confusion, I added a simple information on top of the page, indicating that creating a deal room is possible by clicking on the Create Destination CTA on the top nav bar. The users could also dismiss the info.

Designing: Walkthrough in creating a deal room

There were 4 main steps in creating a deal room:

Adding contacts
Adding content
Settings
Sharing option

Based on the insights from the initial usability tests, I categorized the problem with the legacy design for the new users as follows:

Navigation: The users had to create rooms 4 times by average to learn the ins and outs of the feature without making mistakes
Browsing content items: There wasn't enough space to browse content items, especially in small displays.
Settings: Users often skipped settings since they either didn't notice it, or found it complicated to understand.
Sharing options: To see the sharing options, users had to click on the "share" button on top nav bar. Some of those options were disabled based on contact selection or other settings. Therefore, the uses had to move back and forth multiple times to set the right option

First iteration

The first design (image below) solved the Navigation and Browsing problem. Initially, I thought it was also solving the Settings problem. But after conducting moderated usability tests, I figured out that the problem remains: For small screen sizes, users didn't see Settings and Personalization without scrolling.

First design of the deal room

Final design

To solve the problem of small screen sizes, hence skipping the settings part unintentionally, I made the following changes to the design:

Removed the "Share" CTA from the top nav bar and placed it at the bottom of the page.
Added a left panel, showing the steps and their status.
Added flexibility in navigation from one step to another through auto-scroll, manual scroll, and clicking on the steps in the left panel

Results

Customer satisfaction increased by 30%.
The average product adoption per customer was increased by 20%.
With an impact on the company's objective to reduce churn, through increasing customer satisfaction and new users' adoption, the churn rate was decreased by 80%.

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