Appcues is a tool for building onboarding, feature announcements, surveys, and other experiences right on top of a product without writing any code.
In order to publish the content they build to their end uers, our customers need to install Appcues. Installing is a prerequisite for making the most of Appcues, but our instructions were causing a lot of confusion and unhappiness for our customers, not to mention our own customer success and support teams.
I worked with a wonderful team of four engineers on a project to overhaul the Appcues installation experience. I led the effort from research to design to release.
The result of our efforts is live, but does require a (free!) Appcues account to access.
I began by talking to people. How do the internal teams who work with customers every day think about the problem? In sessions with customer success, support, sales, and marketing folks, I began to map out the customer's journey to installation.
I also gathered and analyzed as much user data as I could find: I conducted exploratory user research, searched our support software and product feedback trackers for anything installation related, and watched FullStory sessions of folks using the existing installation feature.
Next, I documented what I learned in exploratory and generative research. For this project, which spans many different types of users and unfolds over a variable length of time, journey maps and service blueprints ended up working well; I shared them with teammates to get feedback and build shared understanding.
How do similar products solve similar problems? Down with reinventing the wheel!
Once I had a sense of the problem space, I started to map out re-imagined user flows and sketch out rough examples of forms the interface could take. This is the part of the process I tend to spend the most time on; taking time to think in a divergent and generative way pays major dividends later in the project.
01. Flow brainstorming
02. Good ol' pen and paper
03. Low fidelity interface explorations
At this point, it was time to evaluate our most promising concepts with users. We conducted a few rounds of tests with users.
One of many discarded ideas
Each user test we conducted helped us discard some ideas & double down on others.
It's all about the details: We added a persistent link in the nav bar to increase awareness of installation status.
After many rounds of iteration + testing, we eventually decided on a direction that seemed reasonably simple for our team to build and for our customers to use. We created a path for our non-technical users to understand their role in getting Appcues installed, and also created a step-by-step guide that speaks to developers in terms they're used to, and provides rationale for each step in the process.
The iteration was not over yet (is it ever, really?) -- once we decided on a direction, it was time to hammer out all of the visual and interaction details. This was made much easier by our team's design system; which exists in Figma and in React.
Our design system in Figma is created and maintained by our three-person strong design team.
Once we had an experience that was good enough to get into the wild and start learning from, we released it.
Early indicators look good: anecdotal evidence from internal teams and customer conversations suggest the streamlined installation experience makes it easier to get installed quickly + successfully.
During the earlier stages of the project, we defined a set of success metrics and added the necessary product instrumentation to track progress over time. This will help us continue to enhance the experience + make the complex process of installation as simple and pleasant as possible.