Design: Journey-mapping, IA, prototyping & concept-testing
Increased user engagement for Hootsuite mobile …
… and won a team’s trust ✨
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.
Hootsuite’s mobile app lacked clarity on its business value. Collaborating with the mobile team, I identified what paying customers value in a mobile experience and developed concepts for retention opportunities.
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! ✨
“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
It was important for the team to see how the UI could scale to support different user segments. This way we could start to visualize how to package features based on actual needs.
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.”
The first release, a summary view of planned posts, resulted in a 60% lift in paying user engagement (10 sessions per week per user to 16 sessions per week).
