I will love to share my story about the road to redesigning the enterprise dashboard vision as the primary designer.
This is work spanning from the beginning of the year till now
The Team
I am the primary designer on this project and I work with Susan who is the design lead and has been of great guidance to me in this team.
In the enterprise team, I worked alongside 2 product managers, 2 researchers, 2 content strategists & 7 engineers. And a lot of stakeholders like my manager Jonathan, Charles the VP of Engineering, Erica the VP of design, and Aleks a VP of product.
All working remotely due to the pandemic in cities around the world like San Francisco, Ottawa, Portland, and Amsterdam.
Differentiating the enterprise & self-serve experiences
Feedback from the sales team was that Customers could not see the value, of our enterprise tool because it was not differentiated enough from self-serve.
Before moving forward I will love to define what self-serve & enterprise is.
We define enterprises as large and medium organizations like Verizon & Box
while we define self-serve as individuals which make 60% of our overall revenue.
Here is an example of the self-serve experience and enterprise experience
The highlighted area in blue is the difference between our enterprise solution and self-serve solution.
They are basically the same thing and this is a big problem for our present customers and new customers, who are not sure of the value add of this tool.
The truth is that this enterprise tool was designed for a self-serve user but repurposed for an enterprise user in 2018 to go quickly into the market.
Our Enterprise Dashboard
To solve our problem statement of How might we differentiate the enterprise and self-serve experience
We decided to start with the dashboard because it is the entry point for all enterprise end-users.
It is the jumping-off point for our enterprise users to achieve their unique goals and complete required tasks
A solution tied to a non-existent problem
At the beginning of this project Prasad, the PM on this project dug up an old solution from 2017 and recommended that we turn the dashboard into a hub.
On this hub, they had a user profile section, then a Leader board area to show the Top 3 most active users in an organization, also had quick polls for I don’t know what & a survey browsing feature.Did you know that you can blog right from your published website? Once you publish your site, go to your website’s URL and log
They were way too many assumptions in this solution by our PM. We did not understand why our users needed this Hub. So I, Jonathan my boss, and our Senior director, Stacy had a conversation about this and said nope!
We did not feel confident that this was the correct solution.
We believed we didn’t know enough to proceed and we knew the solution was tied to a non-existent problem. So we recommended foundational research to understand the behaviors of an enterprise end-users
Identifying gaps to inform learning.
I and our Lead designer Susan spent a few days reviewing all the past quantitative and qualitative data, product research put together. Then we brought the broader team together:
Which consisted of our researcher Toluwa, Prasad our PM, and Onder another PM on this project for a couple of workshop sessions, so we could understand what we knew about our user behaviors because we cannot solve problems that do not exist.
I & Toluwa our Researcher - developed a format, We took aspects of the proposed Hub solution and put them in columns
Then, for the horizontal rows, we wanted participants to list the goals by user type. The second row, list the pain points and obstacles
And last, a row for questions we still had.
Participants were to only add a post-it note if it was supported by our research
After this workshop, it was evident that we did not understand the goals by our user types.
Focused Research Objectives?
We came out of this workshop with 3 main questions
What do people want to learn about?
What do people want to be aware of?
What actions aid organizational-wide collaborations
These enabled me and our researcher to conduct a research study on the dashboard.
Research insights
For this Study I & Toluwa our researcher spoke to 10 participants from 10 different organizations that use our product
After this research, we came back with 3 key Insights:
Prioritize creating and finding surveys
Show people their most recent surveys upon login, including direct links to the survey design, collection or analyze depending on the status of the survey.
Include only relevant notifications
An activity feed is helpful only if it links people to the necessary actions they need to take e.g. providing feedback or resolving a comment
Provide personalized support
Have ways to customize learning and support based on the individual’s use of and experience with the tool.
Enterprise User Types.
Before we go ahead Q4 2020 leading to this project the research team conducted research about collaboration in SurveyMonkey.
The Outcome was amazing: they uncovered 5 unique user types.
Which are:
The Driver, Someone who initiates a research project typically a PM
The Specialist like a product researcher who spends the most time in our tool
there’s also The Stakeholder maybe like the product researcher’s boss - who oversees and approved the work
Then the Contributor someone like the data scientist
And last the Admin, who manages the SurveyMonkey tool
Our Enterprise Design Principles.
From that same research, we generated 4 key principles
Which in those lenses have been key through our journey:
Our Enterprise Dashboard Vision
This was a huge project, This meant that I needed to have everything figured out before stakeholders and execs would commit to moving forward with this project.
So We decided to create a vision that demonstrated that, what we were creating will gracefully cascade to support all customer’s needs and create momentum for the project because there were way too many stakeholders.
Plus engineering was also scared. So we wanted to give a high-level idea of the capabilities. Unfortunately, this project did not follow an agile approach and was more waterfall so we could phase out design for engineering to build.
The Vision Type Approach
We approached this vision by Firstly Understanding how organizational knowledge could provide a good experience.
We also had to solve for guidance which was a new topic for us.
Then mapped out the enterprise user journey because we wanted to understand where they are going and what they are doing from the dashboard.
This followed by Presenting the vision to our stakeholders to gain buy-in
we also had to scale and work beyond our enterprise customers and also solve for other users. Then work with engineering and product to plan for a release of the product I will do a high-level overview of them as we go on.
Defining Org Value.
After research we knew that working on surveys is an organizational effort, so I started with exploring Solutions. Firstly by facilitating ideations sessions with the content experts -and enterprise customer success managers.
So, we could Understand how SurveyMonkey could different enterprise end-users experience by leveraging organizational knowledge in order to provide a good experience?
From the solutions the participants made - Susan the lead designer and I reviewed and uncovered these 4 takeaways:
Workgroups relevant to me so as to efficiently help me keep my cross-team projects organized.
To Know what team members are working on a project to help me know who I am collaborating with.
Communicating with team members on a project helps me get feedback and updates across my team.
Awareness about valuable features will increase knowledge and help me get even more value from the SurveyMonkey tool.
Guidance ideation workshop
We already started solving for Organizational value for our specialist and driver user type. But Guidance for beginners was fairly a new topic within the enterprise experience. So I had to facilitate another ideation session on guidance.
Remote ideation workshops had been an issue in our org because many participants easily got bored and participation was low.
And from facilitating the previous Organization Knowledge workshop I witnessed that also So I had the challenge of making this an engaging workshop that generated outcomes.
So, I came up with a pirate treasure hunt theme for the workshop to discover the new enterprise dashboard. In this workshop participants also won prizes.
I wish I took pictures of my pirate captain eye patch I had during that workshop to show you all.
And this was very successful, from the solutions the participants made.
I and Susan reviewed and we uncovered 3 takeaways
They need to find past work that the team has done. So as to learn from experts in the team.
Gain confidence Quickly through guidance so as to support me by familiarizing myself with the tool
Find out who the expert is on their team
Mapping the end‐to‐end enterprise user journey
After that, I needed to understand the user’s end-to-end experience across various touch‐points in the dashboard. I spent time using experience mapping techniques to visualize and communicate that
This allowed me to represent customer pain points and see where I needed to focus our attention before investing time.
This was successful because I knew what areas our user types needed support awareness efficiency and wanted to collaborate.
Communicating designs
Working on various fidelities. My process involved sketching and white‐boarding concepts and flows with my PM partner and then translating these directly into high-fidelity design comps to tell a story.
Design System Collaboration
Since I was not working with many existing design patterns, it was not relatively easy to move straight into high-fidelity designs.
I had to collaborate with our design systems lead, Ramiro whose team was creating a new system for SurveyMonkey. And this project was to be a pilot project to introduce the new design system.
Developing a UI Framework
The Vision focused on 3 areas:
The Navigation, The Workspace, and the Communication Space
The Navigation
For the Enterprise navigation, we’ve simplified it to just 3 options.
My Projects: which efficiently gives quick access to ALL of their surveys
My Workgroups: To promote collaboration, users can easily view projects, they and other teams are working on.
Organizational Assets: users are able to use branded & org-approved questions, survey templates, and presentation templates
The Workspace
For Workspace I wanted users to be as efficient as possible. So I made Projects neatly organized so users can easily see all of their projects at a high level.
For open surveys: I surface the health of the survey, for example, the 2nd card is a customer satisfaction survey that shows a low response rate, we tried to make work more efficient by providing the next logical action, which here allows the user to send a reminder email directly from the dashboard. For these, I used Cards because I believed the Card view allows for the display of distinctive and specific information for each survey. It provides good use of real estate which efficiently displays a lot of information in an organized layout for users who value being able to quickly access loads of information to facilitate action. I went deep into this space in my work on the LIHP Cards.
The Communication Space
The last of the 3 areas is the Communication Space.
This space allows for the admins to talk to users and for SM to talk to customers
Admins can increase awareness in an org by giving updates on new features, assets, or even integrations.
Below that SurveyMonkey is able to provide support to users by providing helpful links, This will increase knowledge and help them get even more value from SurveyMonkey.
For Beginners
For beginners, they may not have any experience building surveys.
They might lack confidence or even feel anxiety.
So, I designed a Guided walk-through to familiarize the user with the tool
on the Second screen, we support them by on-boarding them through quick access to org templates existing team projects how-to articles, and an easy way to find who the team expert is. The goal was to increase confidence and make new users always feel supported.
Scaling the vision to benefit all customers
I also designed a modular UI framework that had to scale beyond the enterprise customers, to a 100% of our customers.
For both Enterprise end-users & admins, Market Research customers, and for our self serve & team users.
This was doneby partnering with various PM’s, designers and engineers in teams in all these business areas of our product.
Presenting the Vision to the Entire Org & Executive Team
I had to present this vision to the entire survey monkey organization, in our all-hands sometime in august this year.
and also present to Executives like our CEO, President, Chief Product Officer, VP’s of product, Engineering & design, and also various other senior stakeholders.
I had never done a presentation at this scale before but loved the challenge and was happy that the executives got to hear me talk about the effort which they loved and this got a lot of momentum for this project.
Planning for Development
This project is so BIG!
I had to work with our lead designer Susan, the senior director of design Stacy, our PM Prasad, 2 engineering managers & the Vp’s of engineering & Product to break the design down into slices, and every slice produced value and learnings over time.
Currently the new dashboard is in development and should be ready by the end of Q1 for task-based testing and Q2 for Phase 1 release.
Positive results and much more to do!
This has been a success so far because we have completed evaluations with users and they are really impressed with how “intelligent” the dashboard vision is.
Measuring The Enterprise Dashboard and Cards Success
That after launch we want to affect these metrics on Dashboard and Cards. So I partnered with the PMs, Design Managers & Engineering Managers, to define these metrics. For most, the Company-wide Metric of 20% increase in engagement will be used.
Next, for secondary metrics, I felt it necessary to break metrics down by user type
The problems and goals are different, so the metrics needed to be relevant.