Increased user engagement for Hootsuite mobile …
… and won a team’s trust ✨
I led a design vision and shaped two releases, lifting overall customer engagement by 60%.
Hootsuite’s mobile app lacked clarity on its business value. Collaborating with the mobile team, I identified what paying customers value and developed design concepts for retention opportunities.
What is Hootsuite?
Hootsuite is the largest social media management platform in the world, and a big Canadian success story. Trusted by more than 18 million customers, Hootsuite enables social media managers to publish and send more than 4 million social media posts every week.
What I did
Working with product management and engineering, I showed what an experience could look like that would increase user retention. I used a variety of inputs, including prior user research, stakeholder feedback, usage data, and a competitive analysis to shape the experience vision.
I also:
Mentored & worked with 2 other designers
Led journey-mapping workshops & feasibility checks with the whole product & engineering team
Outlined opportunity areas for ideation
Developed and tested an IA and core design concepts
Results
The work shaped the “how” of the mobile product strategy, driving the next quarter’s roadmap as well as longer term plans. I am most proud of how I helped a team from that went from UX avoidant to UX ally! ✨
Read on to see a little of my process below. 👇
“Checking in” is what Hootsuite mobile users value in the app
“Checking-in” means target — paying — customers use Hootsuite mobile as a consumption experience, supporting them in their in-between moments of productive work on their desktop or laptop.
This is the top takeaway from prior research, where I conducted a mixed-method study that included a survey, user interviews, and a concept test. I found a similar theme when I reviewed NPS comments, Sales’ closed-lost notes, and support tickets.
Here are the research insights presentations I shared with the team: user interviews & concept validation and a follow-up survey to bolster the qualitative findings.
How the app failed to support “checking in”
Together with the team, I outlined users’ top tasks and needs as they relate to a mobile experience to understand how our current features support (or fail) our users in their journey. This diagram is a detail of this mapping exercise.
Foregrounding opportunity areas
Opportunity areas included creating summary views, clearly showing what’s new or what needs review, and backgrounding the publishing “from scratch” experience on mobile.
The IA: a consumption-focused experience
Here’s a small detail of a restructured IA to support what we knew app users value: “checking in.”
For example, the publisher experience foregrounded reviewing and approving planned content as opposed to composing from scratch.
Scaling the UI to different “checking in” moments
Adapting the UI for different “check-in” moments was key. The team needed to see how it could support various user groups. This helped us plan features based on real needs. The examples below feature two core design concepts: summary views and unified filters to make “checking in” easy for every user group.
Two releases and a lift in key metrics
The experience vision resulted in two successive releases with concepts from the experience vision:
A main summary view
A unified filter
The first shipped in June 2021 and the second in November 2021 which resulted resulted in a 60% lift in paying user engagement (10 sessions per week per user to 16 sessions per week).
There was a positive uptick in app store reviews as well!
The first release shipped June 2021 enabling mobile users to see outgoing content at a glance.
The second release shipped November 2021, featuring a unified filtering pattern, enabling mobile users to drill down to specific content types within a given view.
Lasting impact
The experience vision drove product focus for the mobile retention strategy. It shaped the immediate roadmap and longer term plans.
It also convinced product to adjust the North Star metric, to reflect true user value — “checking in” — as opposed to the original metric which tracked the number of “messages sent.”
More than the numbers, I’m proud of the trust I built with the mobile team over the year. It wasn’t always easy, and I would do some things differently now, but I had fun, and I think my teammates in product and engineering did too!