Trailblazing Design Thinking in the Growth organization

Medium: Web

Responsibilities: Spearheading UX, educating stakeholders on why UX is important, how is UX relevant to the business, and getting budget

Results: 20% decrease in bounce rate, 10% increase in sessions, users, and 3% increase in page views

Headcount & resources: Went from 0-2 head counts and 100K research budget a quarter

Teams collaborated with:

• Product Marketing

• Content Strategy

• Strategy & Ops

• Web Engineering

circa 2016

Wild, wild west

When I was first hired at AppDynamics, I was told to "make the website better"; little did I know, the organization was nascent to any experience, let alone UX. "User Experience" was a foreign buzz word. People understood it was needed, but not sure why. I realized my challenge was more than the website; it is to foster an environment of design thinking. In addition to work shown here, there has been workshops conducted department wide to educate stakeholders on what is user experience and how it is relevant to the business.

No journeys, no experience

The primary function of the pages were predominantly SEO focused. There was no pathways to engage our users purposefully beyond one page. We set out to redefine how the website matches back to meet our funnel needs: 

We want to create a tailored experience with our "solutions" pages for each persona with cross linking between product and solution pages:

Full Journeys

Twist of fate - "Website is not on the roadmap"

There was a shift in executive focus to support Sales effort, and the website did not make it on the list. At the Summit New York event last year, I launched a survey that brought the website back:  

This was presented to the CEO, and turned the ship 180. Website was back in business! 

New Brand and Systems

We were then commissioned to revamp the website with a 8-week timeline, in time for our company kickoff day. We were going through rebrand and received this new preliminary visual guidelines:

Brand Axis

The brand axis aims to target the vast audience we have- from business owners to developers, which makes it relatable on different levels:

Brand to Web translation

I partnered with an agency on execution on assets and focused on art direction, and design system

While the axis serves well in other mediums and channels, such as print, social media, it was clear that the website will need to stick to neutral as it is a crucial touch point across all digital channels. We started to created a mood board and brainstormed on which direction it could go:

Roadblock

Because of the lack of development resources and impacted timeline, we were told we could only make changes to existing design framework. We focused instead on the design system and adding 1-2 new components.

Design System

Atomic Design System was used as a reference for our 1.0 style guide version: 

Page Hierarchy

An effort was made in differentiating the types of information displayed, from high level, to content heavy:

Responsive screens:

Visual assets

Strategy and Research

Since we only had about 8 weeks, we decided to concentrate on what impacted the business the most. We focused on the APM journey, which accounted for 60% of our business. Through user interviews, we validated all designs put out, and uncovered forward-looking nuggets. 

Home Page

The then current home page does not present enough value proposition at first glance. We want something engaging right off the bat to encourage deeper dive.

Home Page version 1 - See it all

This is the comprehensive version, where the hypothesis is assuming glimpses into everything is wanted:

High Fidelity

Home Page version 2 - Role focused

This is the role focused version with a hypothesis that personalization works early in the funnel, while product takes a secondary place. There is also an emphasis on thought leadership and industry news towards the bottom.

High Fidelity

Home Page version 3 - Interactive is key

The hypothesis for this short home page is that people don't need a lot to further deep dive especially if it is interactive. The interactive module is the star here.

Results

We tested these 3 version with 15 people, 5 developers, 5 ops and 5 business owners over remote 45-minute interviews. 

Highlights: 

• The platform module was very intriguing. High level of activity there.

• 90% of participants’ first click would be one of the roles.

• The navigation bar in version 1 caught the most attention. While hamburger menu is perceived as modern when noticed, most did not notice the menu.

• The slider component is seen as interesting but too abstract

Other insights include the mental modal of how they arrive at the website, and what matters to them in the next 3-5 years.

*The same rigor is applied to APM and How it works pages before launching.  

Recommended Home Page

Additional Challenges

We had significant lack of development resources that prevented us from making more progress. We were also missing messaging framework that impeded content production. Lesson learned here is create small lifts that has big impacts.

What's next

Global navigation study is underway, along with brand awareness research.

Design system 1.2 is launching soon. Partnership with product experience on unifying end-to-end experience.