Culture
On a typically rainy day in England, we in the product team at SocialOptic have plenty to smile about! Our culture of continual improvement underpins the way we work, and we are always looking to improve our products. We do this by listening to our users, with regular roundtable discussions, focus groups, our CSAT surveys, and 1-2-1’s via the support team. Through these feedback channels, we knew our management user interface, although functional, could be improved. In response, we launched a redesign project, in parallel with other roadmap developments, with the objective of exploring and implementing a new design approach.
Today, we have completed the first phase of this effort, bringing a significant improvement in the user experience (UX) of our flagship product, SurveyOptic. No wonder I’m smiling!
Read on to discover more about the goals for our redesign efforts, and what you can expect to see over the coming months.
Design Goals
With small, high-performing development teams, product changes can be turned around rapidly. But with an already established user-base, we had to be careful to evolve and enhance with existing users in mind, providing a smooth transition for them.
Therefore, we have a checklist of principles to ensure we stay on course when changing the way our products look and feel:
- Usability – making complicated functions as intuitive as possible
- Utility – making every feature clear in purpose and efficient to use
- Accessibility – ensuring the product is usable by the widest set of users
- Familiarity – providing a natural progression for established users
- Consistency – reusing display/interaction paradigms, so users learn once and apply the knowledge across the product
- Delightfulness – presenting a clean, modern user experience that is a joy to use
- Future proofing – ensuring there’s room to grow, through design that can adapt to future functionality
SocialOptic Approach
With development and design teams working together, we started from the ground up with a revised design system, giving us consistency of the fundamentals such as spacing and sizing… an essential base upon which to build upon.
We adopted the biological analogy for our reusable UI building blocks: atoms being the smallest of components (such as a button), with molecules made of atoms (for example a group of buttons), and larger organisms made of molecules (for example an actions bar).
We agreed on a phased, gradual rollout, starting with the surveys page, the cornerstone for getting things done in SurveyOptic. Many design ideas were considered, discussed, evaluated, and some iterated. The finished implementation was then rolled out to sister pages in SurveyOptic, such as the Templates, Audiences, and Dashboards pages, ensuring consistency across the product.
With our commitment to solicit internal and external feedback at every stage, we began by rolling out the phase 1 changes to users who have opted to switch on early access to new features, in their account settings. After this initial beta period, and some further tweaks, the changes will now be rolled out to all users in the coming weeks. We will of course be looking for further feedback!
What Next for SurveyOptic?
For phase 2, we have the survey editor experience under the microscope. This is obviously a key area of SurveyOptic functionality and value, and the natural place for us in the product team to look to optimise and improve next.
Beyond that, we will continue to widen the scope of the project, with our respondent data management tools, and reporting data analysis features likely to receive our focus in the subsequent phases.
And Finally…
At SocialOptic we are always striving to be the best at what we do. A redesign effort requires careful planning and well-defined goals to be successful, but with the right processes in place, should result in measurable improvements in user productivity, and customer satisfaction.
We hope our users will enjoy the differences they see in the product as we continue to invest in our user experience, and rollout more improvements over the coming months. Please do share your experiences with us!