Foster a community where customers can share ideas, ask questions, and receive updates from your company.
Problem
– Companies want to identify the most valuable product improvements requested by customers.
– Customers are eager to share their feedback and want to know the company is listening and responding to them.
– Existing tools make it difficult to engage with customers, thus resulting in a poor user experience, negative perception of the company, and a lack of valuable feedback being addressed.
Goals
– Design a new portal where customers can share their ideas for product improvements and vote on ideas from other users.
– Make it easier for companies to review, moderate, and triage ideas so they can prioritize the most valuable product improvements demanded by their customers.
– Allow companies to respond to ideas and update the status so customers know their ideas are being considered.
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:
– Existing tools did not effectively filter out low-quality, misplaced, or duplicate posts, thus resulting in clutter.
– Managers struggled to sort through this clutter to prioritize and respond to customer ideas.
– Customers felt they were being ignored thus and lost faith in the product.
– Due to decreased engagement and increasing clutter, the products provided less value to the company over time.
In some cases, 10,000+ ideas were never seen or responded to.
Designing the MVP for "Ideas"
A major issue with other products was a siloed hierarchy where ideas were divided into categories in walled-off forums. When customers submitted ideas under the wrong categories (a common mistake), these ideas were rarely seen by relevant stakeholders. The D365 back-end also made transferring ideas from one forum to another impossible, so a solution was imperative.
To prevent ideas from becoming miscategorized and lost, I designed the community hierarchy to group all ideas into product-level forums. Categories were then applied to ideas as tags which could easily be filtered without navigating to a new page.
Note: the following designs display the "Q&A" variation of the Ideas site.
Home
Forum
Idea
Setting a benchmark
Once the MVP was built in a sandbox environment, our research team conducted a benchmark test. Participants ran through a series of basic unguided tasks until they either succeeded or gave up, then answered a few survey questions 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.
+ “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."
– “I think it might be a little bit small [at the top]...it will be better if it moved a little bit lower.”
– “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
1. Improve visibility of search
To address the struggles participants experienced using search, I redesigned the home page to emphasize the search bar front and center. Not only would did make it easier to find the search bar, but we hoped the increased emphasis on search would encourage users to search for existing ideas before posting new ones.
2. Suggest related ideas
Continuing with the goal of reducing clutter and driving engagement with existing ideas, I designed a view that encouraged users to vote for related ideas before posting new ideas.
3. Implement better moderation tools
Admins would inevitably need to take action on duplicate ideas, spam, and low-quality content. This would be accomplished by allowing users to flag submitted posts. Admins could review the report history and take action on suspect posts.
Ideas becomes Communities
Throughout this entire process, we considered the market fit and value proposition of Ideas. Our leadership concluded that our product would be more compelling as a broader Community site marketed toward customer engagement and support. This would consist of several pillars: Ideas, Q&A, Knowledge Base, and blogs or discussion forums.
I created a proof-of-concept by designing a series of templates that scaled to a wide variety of formats, all unified under a single navigational hierarchy. Furthermore, these templates could be customized by companies and easily embedded within their websites.
Concepts for a Community portal
Branded examples
In retrospect
I was reassigned to another team before I could see this product through to public preview, so I wasn't able to gauge the full outcome. Looking back, this project was an incredible learning experience for me. Beginning with a strong foundation in UX research helped me identify the root problems and deliver a simple, intuitive, and useful tool for customer engagement. I also learned a great deal about accessibility, shaping my approach to product design.
I wish I could have led Communities to maturity, but I'm proud to say I got it off the ground.
