Rapidly growing channel adoption
In 2021, several organizations across Salsify received and documented problems around customers not being able to use and get value out of their channels, the primary place where users map and publish product data to retailer websites. To avoid the risk of churn, a cross-functional working group was assembled to evaluate and increase adoption of Channels by customers publishing to Salsify's top 2 retailer sites.
Top company priority
Given that Salsify's core value proposition includes allowing customers to publish product content to any retailer website, this problem became a top company priority and was tracked in our shared business metrics.
My role
Spearheaded the first comprehensive research study cross-organizational UX research effort
Led weekly meetings with partners from product, marketing, and retail success
Created a research project plan and defined project objectives, alignment with business goals, research methodology, timeline, and deliverables.
Worked with a UX Researcher to manage user recruitment and tracking
Drafted an interview script and led user interview calls
Synthesized data to arrive at prioritized insights using Affinity Mapping
Identified personas and presented key findings to the R&D organization
My team
Product Management
Karthik Sekhar, Senior Product Manager
Matthew Waite, Group Product Manager
Gareth Ouellette, Senior Director, Product Management
Product Design
Helen Zhang, Product Designer (Me)
Nell Hellem, UX Research Intern
Silvia Diaz, UX Research Intern
Marketing
SJ Petteruti, Principal Go-to-Market Strategist
Rob Lawless, Community Marketing Director
Retail success
Kelly Rianda, Director, Retail Success
Lower churn risk and increase publish activity for customers selling on top retailer sites.
Customers perceived their channels were taking too long to set-up and were not seeing the value quickly enough.
Adoption funnel
As an organization, we had previously defined an adoption funnel for retailer Channels, inspired by member sign-up flows for B2C products.
Success metric
At the beginning of the year, we measured a 39% adoption rate by eligible customers selling to Salsify's top two retailers. We set a north star goal of 70% adoption, with an end of year goal of 46-54%.
What catalyzed this investment?
In 2021, the Retail Success team conducted an in-app survey that targeted customers publishing to Salsify's top 2 retailers between March 29 to April 8. The survey asked users about their current usage, how content they were, and what would encourage them to take greater advantage of their Channels.
Findings: Retailer 1
53 users out of 50 unique customer accounts publishing products to Retailer 1 responded with the following:
"I never feel like an expert… it seems I could be doing much more with Salsify"
-Survey respondent, Retailer 1
Findings: Retailer 2
55 users out of 53 unique customer accounts publishing products to Retailer 2 responded with the following:
"Channel mapping is too complicated"
-Survey respondent, Retailer 1
Takeaways
In response to customer feedback, the working group ideated several initiatives including a customer webinar to strengthen retailer partnerships, bootcamps to educate customers on how to configure Channels for specific retailers, and a Slack channel where users can share tips directly with each other in a community forum.
When it came to making changes to the core platform, it was less clear what to invest in to make the most direct impact on adoption. My teammates consistently asked, who is using these channels? I saw this as an opportunity for UX to play a role in uncovering top user pain points across the adoption funnel and identifying user personas.
Design process
In support of our adoption goal, I led a research effort to learn about and identify top user needs and user personas. Using these learnings, I worked with my PM to organize an experiment that resulted in 42% of successfully targeted customers moving funnel stages within 50 days.
UX Research
I worked closely with my cross-functional partners to gather their needs and questions around users. I created a research plan reflecting what I learned and reviewed our progress every week to move our research efforts forward.
Working with a UX researcher, we recruited 15 users from 10 customer accounts representing enterprise >$2B and smaller, more agile <$2B organizations.
I ran the user interviews and invited members of the working group and executive team to participate. Interview participants were often willing to share their screen and show us exactly where they encountered issues or mismatched expectations.
Tagging themes to synthesize notes
My UX research partner and I uploaded all calls to Dovetail, our research repository. We transcribed the audio and marked our notes using Dovetail's tagging feature.
Although my project focus was on channel adoption, I was able to share relevant tags with other designers and product managers whose ongoing work shared overlap with ours.
Arriving at insights through Affinity Mapping
Once user interviews and tagging was completed, I coordinated an Affinity Mapping session with my working group to group our data and vote on top priorities. I pre-populated a Miro board with stickies using data from our calls and organized them by user.
We spent 30 minutes grouping takeaways and another 30 minutes drafting “I” statements and discussing our findings. We then prioritized the “I” statements based on what would bring the most value to users and landed on 2 major themes.
Research deliverables
After completing the affinity mapping activity, I wrote up a research insight document and put together a presentation outlining our top takeaways from user research. I distributed and presented our findings to the R&D organization, Retail Success, Marketing, and Executive team. Our work generated conversation at all levels, as stakeholders envisioned possibilities for Salsify's long-term vision and short-term strategy.
1
Top user needs
I want mapping to be faster and easier
I need to understand what feedback to action on, and need more information to help me decide
2
Secondary priorities
I want to publish data the same way I store it. I want an efficient way to manage product variants.
I want to know when my products go live and if they’re represented as I intended. I need a way to action on blockers to either.
I publish at different frequencies to different destinations. I am looking to automate the majority of my publishes.
3
Other themes
I want to know immediately when expectations change and what they are
I want to work in Salsify, not my retailer portal
I want to customize the view of my Channels in the manner I choose
Product content comes from multiple sources/departments and approvals before making it into Salsify. As a result, I need to cross-reference and republish channels regularly
I need Channels to work for large product selections
I need more visibility and control over my digital assets in Channels
User personas
From our research, I identified two new user personas in the Channels space — a technical user and a business user.
User journey
I plotted their roles along the Channel user journey from set-up to post-publish feedback in context of the other personas they likely work with.
Design experiment
While I was excited by the contributions our research had made to our channel adoption initiative and beyond, it was important that UX play a role in moving the needle toward our business goal of 46-54% adoption by the end of the year.
To address in part the top pain point we identified, "I want mapping to be easier," my product manager and I designed an experiment to evaluate the use of in-app enablement. During user interviews, we heard on many instances how users expected information in context of where they're working in the Channel.
Goal
Measure whether customers who had interacted with the in-app guided tour would be more likely to move funnel stages than those who had not.
Targeted users
We targeted customer accounts who had a Channel creation date of 2019 or later within the "Has Channel Created" and "Has started configuration" funnel stages.
We decided to leverage Appcues to create and target in-app messaging. I began by identifying areas of the user flow that would be most impactful with my PM and mapped out the tour.
Opt-in banner
Tooltips
I then determined the components and drafted the messaging. I workshopped my designs with my team during design review.
After sharing the designs with my product manager, I built the flow in Appcues and connected it with the starting point our engineering partners developed.
Business impact
After reviewing the results of the experiment, we believed there was strong indication that guided experiences in a channel would have a significant impact on a customer's ability to successfully move through the adoption funnel.
100% of those who saw the guided tour completed it compared to the industry average completion rate for product tours of 61%. Considering that these were not first-time customers either, these results demonstrated to us a proven appetite for in-context education in a Channel.
42% of successfully targeted customers move funnels compared to 18% movement of those who were excluded from the guided tours.
Impact on adoption
Through our collective efforts, our working group was able to move the needle on customer adoption of Salsify's top retailer Channels by 10% in 6 months. We were well on our way to hitting our end of year goal.