Concept testing solutions  

Design Lead & Manager, 2019
Strategy, Facilitation, Research & testing, Design

Transform concepts into decisions with top-notch methodology and expertise at high speed.

Intro

SurveyMonkey’s mission is to empower the curious, and our survey product does just that — it empowers users to create surveys and find valuable insights for themselves.

Currently, we provide rich features for all users, but we’re not orienting our survey tool to address specific user needs. What if we could stay horizontal to serve a large user base, but also go deep to deliver higher value to our users and business? Imagine users coming to SurveyMonkey to choose a product that is highly tailored to their specific needs and workflows, right on our core survey platform.

My role

As the design lead, I worked closely with stakeholders and cross-functional teams to define and execute this project. My contribution includes: 


Facilitated collaborative sessions with cross-functional teams to define product definition and requirements

Planned, directed, and orchestrated multiple design initiatives throughout the project lifecycle

Presented complex product vision and design concepts to stakeholders and the organization

Advocated and applied user-centric process in collaboration with cross-functional teams

Solving the right problem

SurveyMonkey has 17.5 million active users who use our surveys to learn valuable insights on countless topics. How do we know which user group to target? What are the criteria we need to consider? Where do we even start?

Prior to my arrival, our strategy and research teams had done some great work and came up with a shortlist of the top 12 use cases to consider.  

21

user interviews

1,000+

market opportunity surveys

12

proposed use cases (in 4 categories)

That was a great start, but there was still a lot to do until we could identify the one use case we all could get behind. When I interviewed key stakeholders, there were different opinions on strategy and directions. In order to succeed, I knew we needed to build a shared knowledge base, build trust among cross-functional teams, and focus on the end-users. 

Collaborative workshop

I planned, proposed, and ran a two-day workshop with 15+ attendees from engineering, product, design, research, strategy, marketing, and customer service. Thanks to everyone's participation, we were able to achieve some great outcomes as mentioned below.  

Shared knowledge base

We shape our views of the world based on our own perspectives and the information we know. Sometimes we forget that others may not see things in the same way, or they may not know what we know. It's important to bridge our knowledge gaps by sharing what we know and make well-informed decisions collectively.  

A multi-day cross-functional workshop at this scale is costly. I reviewed and iterated the agenda with key stakeholders multiple times to make sure we used your time wisely and everyone got values out of it. 

The topics we covered gave us valuable insights including historical context, business rationale, company strategy, research findings, and goal alignment. 

Photo: Our VP of Product presenting the project's business rationale

User sympathy

We identified key user personas for the four use case categories and role-played to map user journeys. This helped the team to build sympathy for our users, which served as the foundation for our processes going forward. 

Photo: A persona taking shape via whiteboarding exercise

Design exploration

I had the attendees work together in smaller groups to build design hypotheses and explore design solutions. It was a great way to get the cross-functional team comfortable participating in the design process. 

Photo: Design exploration exercise (based on a hypothesis the team built in the previous step) 

Prioritization matrix

The workshop was designed to explore the use cases from different angles such as user needs, business objectives, product scalability, etc. At the end of Day 2, the team gathered all the info they learned and ranked the use cases in a prioritization matrix defined by Opportunity and Ability-to-win (Feasibility) axes. 

This was not the end of the strategy phase, but a well-inform opinion that came from the team. I used this to start the synthesizing process with our key stakeholders. 

Example of the prioritization matrix shown

Strategic communication

I partnered with my cross-functional counterparts to synthesize the workshop's outcomes and presented our findings and recommendations to C-level leaders. They provided us valuable insights into the company's holistic long term goals and identified opportunities where we could align our goals with other teams'. We took another round of concept validation with targeted users to nail down the final use case. I visualized our product vision via high fidelity design and slides which we used to present to the whole company.

Why Concept Testing? 

The Concept Testing space is worth $3.2 billion in Total Addressable Market, and 45% of the Market Powered Data use cases. 

Targeted audiences: Research & Insight Teams, Consultant & Ad Agencies (primary) and Marketing Team (secondary).

We have a strong ability to win and differentiate with our own audience targeting proprietary panel. 

Our work is scalable because we can replicate the framework and use the same components to allow users to test multiple concept types (ie ads, logo, messaging, etc.)

The team leads presenting Concept Testing vision work to the entire company

Design Execution

Our users are the experts in the fields, so we needed to build a tool that fits their workflow. We wanted to be as user-centric as possible while staying lean & agile.

Discovery

I interviewed our internal market researchers to learn about their tasks and workflow because they run concept testing projects, ranging from ad campaigns to messaging strategies.  

Define principles

We learned that our user's needs often slide between two opposing forces. For example, they want standardization but also flexibility. I developed a series of "tension of needs" to guide us through the design process.  

Design

I created a holistic flow chart, assigned designers to work on different flows, and orchestrated frequent check-ins for review and feedback. This helped us achieve a large amount of work while staying connected to the bigger vision of our product.  

Iterate and test

We held bi-weekly usability testing sessions and iterated quickly based on user feedback.

Feature discoverability

Using our existing panel selection tool, the testers had a hard time finding the robust options our Audience panel offered because the first thing users think of when they start a concept testing project is finding their targeted consumers.

After the iteration, all of our testers got through this step in 50%+ faster than the previous group.

Results

I led 5 designers from various teams to work with our cross-functional partners in an agile and iterative process to successfully deliver on time.

We developed the user's "hierarchy of data needs" from the discovery phase and used it as a compass to guide us through the design and iteration steps.  Our design is a validated direct translation of the user's workflow.

Design shown are collaboratively done by Holly Gibbs, Melissa Carmichael, John Marek, Hally Bowman, and myself.  

“My end goal is how to close the loop with stakeholders and use data to tell the story in a compelling way”

Lyssette C., UX Research and Customer Insights at Square

Thoughts and learning

Working on the company's flagship project at this scale had me think really hard about how to be strategic as a design leader. The word "strategy" repeatedly showed up everywhere: our team meetings, company presentations, and feedback sessions from my boss - and it took on new layers of meaning each time being mentioned. 

So what does strategy mean anyway? And how to come up with a good one? I turned to this gem written by Julie Zhuo for the answers. Here are my reflection on the 3 tips she gave: 

Create alignment around what success looks like

When I came on board, I was assigned a project that had many names: Use Cases, Modules, Platform Solutions to name a few. I was given a wide range of definitions and directions from different team leaders. With the support of the cross-functional team, my collaborative workshop laid the foundation for us to bridge gaps and review the project under multiple lenses. We were able to unite in a single direction moving forward because we aligned on what success looks like early in our process.

Understand which problem you're looking to solve for which group of people

User-centric is not a "design" approach. It's a mindset that needs to be understood and practiced by everyone involved. By involving a diverse team in the beginning, we were able to gain valuable inputs from our research, strategy, product, engineering, customer support partners.  This collaboration also helped to build rapport and trust among teams, ensuring their participation throughout the project.

Prioritize. And cut.

This one is particularly hard. While we were able to move from ambiguity to execution rather quickly and efficiently, there were features that were cut due to multiple reasons. We decided to only deliver what we would be proud of instead of aiming for an MVP. While the work is far from finished, I am proud of what we have done and what we can improve in the future based on user feedback. 

Want to hear more about this project? Email me at justquan@gmail.com, read the product announcement, or experience it yourself.

justquan@gmail.com     LinkedIn

©2024 - Quan Nguyen