Build a community where customers can share ideas, ask questions, and get updates
Context
Microsoft sought a better tool to curate feedback and ideas from their customers so they could prioritize meaningful product improvements.
When I joined Microsoft, the company used multiple tools to curate feedback. However, all of these tools were hampered by usability issues.
My team was asked to design an easy-to-use product to replace existing tools at Microsoft and then market this solution to other companies.
Goals
✴️ Replace existing tools
Design a new portal where customers can share their ideas for product improvements and vote on ideas from other users.
Design a new portal where customers can share their ideas for product improvements and vote on ideas from other users.
⚙️ Easy to manage
Make it easier for companies to review, moderate, and triage ideas to prioritize the most valuable product improvements demanded by their customers.
Make it easier for companies to review, moderate, and triage ideas to prioritize the most valuable product improvements demanded by their customers.
📈 Drive meaningful improvements
With the help of this new experience, we expect to deliver meaningful product improvements to Microsoft customers.
With the help of this new experience, we expect to deliver meaningful product improvements to Microsoft customers.
💵 Sell to other companies
Ultimately, we hoped to scale this product beyond ideas and sell it as a template, allowing other companies to build communities for their own customers.
Ultimately, we hoped to scale this product beyond ideas and sell it as a template, allowing other companies to build communities for their own customers.
Starting with user research
Before anything went into code, we conducted focus group interviews with product managers at Microsoft to identify fundamental issues with the products they already used:
🗑️ Clutter
Customers tended to post new ideas rather than vote on existing ideas, which led to a buildup of clutter—duplicates, low-quality, and misplaced ideas.
Customers tended to post new ideas rather than vote on existing ideas, which led to a buildup of clutter—duplicates, low-quality, and misplaced ideas.
😓 Management pain
Product managers lacked effective tools to sort through this clutter and respond to the most valuable ideas.
Product managers lacked effective tools to sort through this clutter and respond to the most valuable ideas.
📣 Lack of feedback
Customers felt ignored because their ideas were not being responded to.
Customers felt ignored because their ideas were not being responded to.
🤬 Negative perception
As these issues compounded, customers began to lose faith in the product, thus damaging its value and potential impact.
As these issues compounded, customers began to lose faith in the product, thus damaging its value and potential impact.
These problems created a negative cycle that was incredibly difficult to break. In some forums, over 10,000 ideas were posted without a response.
Sprint: design a new community website
Our primary goal was to build an entirely new community that was easy to use and customizable, with the ultimate goal of selling this experience to other companies.
I was charged with designing a proof of concept for the customer-facing web experience. This had to be responsive to a wide range of screen sizes.
I also had to consider how this experience would scale to topics beyond ideas, such as Q&A and discussion forums.
This was completed in a single sprint.
Proof of concept: Microsoft Q&A community
Navigation: making ideas more discoverable
A major issue with existing products was a navigational hierarchy that separated ideas into a complex web of walled-off forums.
Customers were forced to choose a category when posting a new idea, but they often didn't know what category to select. If they selected an improper category, their idea would not seen by relevant stakeholders. Even worse, transferring ideas to another category was impossible without losing all votes and comments.
To prevent ideas from becoming miscategorized and lost, I flattened the hierarchy and implemented simple filters to narrow down results.
Benchmark testing
I worked with our research team to conduct a benchmark test using a test build.
Participants ran through a series of simple, unguided tasks until they either succeeded or gave up. After each task, they were prompted with a brief survey and asked to rate the quality of their experience.
The results were overwhelmingly positive—far above the average score for our product division. More importantly, we identified several areas for improvement.
General experience
“I’m fairly impressed with it. Having used different forums and stuff before...I was impressed how simple it is and intuitive it is."
“Just everything is..it just seems much more faster, professional, effective, and easy to use, compare to what I’m using."
Search
“I think it might be a little bit small [at the top]...it will be better if it moved a little bit lower.”
Look and feel
“It looked dated. It just look old to me – the layout, the font, it looks like an old forum design to me.”
Post-benchmark improvements
Following the benchmark, I worked quickly to address the feedback we received.
Our team also began considering how other companies could adopt this experience. I led the design effort by identifying aspects of the UI that could be rebranded.
Lastly, we began exploring improved moderation tools to ensure a safe experience for all community users.
Encouraging users to vote on existing ideas
As part of our goal of reducing clutter and management pain, we aimed to encourage users to vote on existing ideas before posting new ideas.
Given that only 60% of our participants successfully searched for an idea, I worked quickly to emphasize search as a central part of the experience.
To solve this issue, I changed the search bar to a welcome banner—the first thing customers see when they land on this page.
Suggest related ideas
Continuing with the theme of driving users toward existing ideas, I proposed a solution that would display related ideas when a customer attempts to submit a new idea.
Moderation tools
To ensure community safety and help admins triage the inevitable wave of content, we implemented a moderation system allowing users to flag content for review. From here, admins could review flagged content and take action as needed.
Customization
With the basic community product in place, we began to consider how other companies could adopt this experience and integrate it seamlessly into their websites.
I identified UI elements and images that could be customized via the admin portal, then created numerous examples to test the results, ensuring the components scaled to third-party branding.
What I learned
The greatest thing I learned was the value of generative research. From the start, I worked hand-in-hand with UX researchers to gather insights that completely shifted our understanding of users' problems. I also learned how to conduct benchmark tests.
Additionally, I learned a great deal about designing with accessibility in mind. Our team strived to reach a AAA grade for accessibility, a standard I haven't experienced elsewhere.
One area where I could have improved was adopting an ownership mindset. With only a few years of experience under my belt, I was largely reactive—I had not yet developed the soft skills to influence stakeholders and set a high-level design strategy.
Conclusion
I was reassigned to another team before this experience went public.
The ideas portal is now live and being used internally for Microsoft products. However, our plan to expand to external companies seems to have never come to fruition.
