2018

Customer Experience and Product Design for Etoile Web Design

Looking to increase user adoption and retention while also relieving customer support of consistently asked questions, Etoile Web Design was looking to optimize the user experience of their services and products which consisted of 9 Wordpress Plugins and ongoing support.

Introduction

During my collaboration with Etoile Web Design, I led initiatives to enhance the product design and customer experience through improved audience understanding and streamlined UI design. By analyzing user needs and challenges project-by-project, we learned more about the customer base, optimized conversion rates and reduced support demands empowering both customers and the support team.

Discovery

In order to learn more about Etoile Web Designs customers – we sent out a survey and got about 275/700 responses. What we learned from the surveys helped us to prioritize projects based on importance to customers.

Less than 30% of current users would consider themselves developers which came at a complete surprise and influenced a change in overall language usage across all products and the website to be slightly less technical, especially in early touch points in order to better reach audiences.

Approximately 16% of trial users who were interested in purchasing a premium licence weren’t sure how to make a purchase and ended up either abandoning the journey or asking for support. Lowering this number drastically become a primary focus.

Demos, screenshots and money-back guarantees were often cited as the most important factors to customer considering a premium licence so highlighting areas throughout customer journey where we could emphasize these features became important.

Strategy

With our new-found understanding of the customers technical backgrounds, we mapped out entire journeys – noting areas where content was particularly technical and might benefit from being written in an easier-to-digest way for non-developers.

By taking the marketplace, website, and plugin UIs into consideration – we were able to visualize a holistic user flow and ensured to create content at each touchpoint that aligned with not only each step of the customers journey, but used language they could understand at each step of the way.

Mapping out the information architecture (IA) of each of the plugins was another necessary step in understanding where user might be getting lost of confused.

While it was clear that for seasoned technical experts, the incongruencies might not have been a problem – we theorized that it might be contributing to cognitive overload for less technical users and made a point to ensure language, and menu options were as consistent across plugins as possible. This ensured people using more than one plugin wouldn't feel as though they were starting over every time they installed another plugin and would be able to transfer what they learned from one to the next more easily.

The consistency in language also made it easier to test copy edits in the future as well as to create more accurate support documentation especially if people were searching for specific keywords.

Cross-referencing common questions to support and currently missing documentation for self-support – we added tooltips throughout the plugins as a way to assist users who might need a little more information, without getting in the way of users who didn't require it.

Creation & Implementation

Working fast and in close collaboration with development – we updated the UI design of all the plugins in a couple afternoons.

Much of the styling was restricted to what was possible to do within the WordPress environment – and we wanted to ensure we weren't trying to reinvent any wheel. I created a bare-bones style guide (top left) and made slight adjustments as things were implemented as was needed. The result was an easy to navigate, and consistent UI design across all plugins.

The biggest change to the product itself was to visually showcase the premium features in free accounts. This made it easier for users considering to go premium to be reminded in real-time how the premium features might be useful in their current projects.

One of the ways users who wanted to trial premium were getting confused – was that they weren't sure where to paste their key code that they would receive by email when wanting to trial premium.

To make this an smoother experience, we added lock and key graphics to the email and showcased them onsite where they were meant to be used. This drastically cut down the "Where do I put my key?" questions that support was receiving frequently.

Results

15% increase in organic traffic attributed to better keywords
20-30% decrease in bounce rate on plugin sales pages attributed to higher quality content based on customer surveys
17% average decrease in overall bounce website rate
Decreased average page load time by 2.3 seconds by optimizing graphics
Noticeable decrease in repeated questions to support

Interested in learning more about your customers or streamlining your product or service? Let's chat!

Send me a message sharing some information about yourself and what you're looking to achieve and I'll get back to you with next steps within 24 hours.