Workspace Management

Becoming enterprise ready

UserTesting platform never had a workspace or team management structure. Customers could easily find themselves lost in 500 hundred tests created by all of their team members on the platform, which could be a huge pain for research teams, especially those who actively launch tests.

Since 2017, UserTesting has started transforming market strategy from facing small businesses into servicing enterprise customers. Based on this new business objective, this project is tailored to execute product strategy around enterprise-readiness: bring the platform into the modern age while also improving collaboration and organization for enterprise product and research teams. (To view more about enterprise-readiness, please click here.) I was embedded within an engineering squad as the product design lead, partnering with a PM, a UX researcher and a data scientist.

Our budget was 2 quarters and 6 full-time engineers (including 1 tech lead and 1 QA engineer). We spent 1 month understanding customer needs and internal POVs, then 2 months iterating and testing the end solutions, and finished the project in 2 quarters after splitting the vision into 2 major milestones.

Jobs-to-be-done synthesized from customer research and internal business objectives

“Is there a way to have one big enterprise account with smaller sub-accounts? Three teams share the resources from this contract but would prefer to have their own dashboards instead of having separate contracts for each team.”

— SJ

Customer Success Manager at User Testing

“Our research is also getting to people in our org. I don’t want people in another segment interpreting it in a certain way and then those people having a seperate conversation. I want to say to the researcher, ‘This is what we found, this is how I interpreted it’ and then go spread the word.”

— Brian K

UX Researcher (customer X)

“We want our stakeholders to be able to go in and look at tests that are most important to them, but we don’t want too many cooks in the kitchen. We don’t want one stakeholder from one team editing the work of another team’s tests.”

— Murray T

UX Researcher (customer Y)

“At this centralized research team, people come and go all the time. I’d like to make sure the names on each project are updated with new hires, and remove those who are no longer here.”

— Mariam S

Senior Manager (customer Z)

JTBD 1

Admin wants to be able to fluidly manage teams in the account so that their workspace is easy to navigate and reflects actual team structure.

JTBD 2

Research team needs to keep their studies private to themselves so that the assets are protected.

JTBD 3

Researchers wants to prevent other teams from editing their studies so that they can maintain the integrity and accuracy of their work.

JTBD 4

Admin wants to assign roles and permissions to team members so that they can provide controlled visibility to the work.

Design POV

Enterprise customer needs a flexible way to self-manage asset visibility and permission according to their actual team structure, so that they can maintain accuracy and integrity of their work.

Designing with PM, Research, Engineering and CSM

Building team and workspace management lays crucial foundation for future opportunities of collaboration. Other than understanding our customer needs, we also need to have a point of view that aligns with our business strategy and current pricing model. Instead of going into designing experiences right away, I took a step back, sat down with the team and brainstormed on the permission hierarchy and information architecture. 2/3 of engineers on my squad were actually fully remote, so I facilitated the discussions with online brainstorming canvas.

Below is the framework I came up with after mapping out ideas and expectations collected from important internal business stakeholders, including Customer Success Managers and Solution Consultants.

Validation and iteration

My PM partner, researcher and I went straight into testing the mental model with customers that have specifically expressed the needs for team and asset management. During the interviews, we set up the context for the customers based on their own content, and validated the asset hierarchy. What was surprising was that the framework we came up with for roles and permissions turned out to be over-complicated and thus hard to comprehend. It turned out that administrators would be totally satisfied with just 2 tiers of access permissions based on teams. Below is my revised framework for roles and permissions.

Aligning the squad and the whole company on this overarching project

Now that 2 weeks had passed validating and iterating on the information hierarchy, the squad started to feel more urgency on delivering something fast. I was under a lot of pressure from PM and engineering side to go directly into UI design, which in my opinion, was not the right next step. Knowing that this was the first time this squad ever worked with a product designer, I tried to take my time to onboard everyone with the design process by explaining the risks of moving into detailed designs too fast.

In the meanwhile, I came up with 14 major user journeys involved in this project, as artifacts to align the vision with the squad. During those alignment discussions where we talked about mis-alignment, the squad could now easily see that even after we all agreed upon the information architecture, there were still different takes on how the user journeys could be. After a deeper dive into the feasibility constraints in our platform, we sorted out the end vision with a stronger POV. Below is one of the user journeys I discussed with the squad.

Another challenge I was facing was that due to the nature of this overarching project, we were making changes to literally every aspect of our platform: How do we handle navigation system, e.g. existing folder and asset structure? How should we go about transitioning existing users and packages? How could we align timeline with other ongoing projects? How should we appeal and sell to large enterprises as well as small businesses? This project quickly drew the whole company’s attention, from product team, marketing team to sales team.

To manage all that, I had to constantly put myself out there, effectively socialize our scope and focus with the rest of the company, and document the discussions with all stakeholders.

Design within and beyond the design system

Putting the UI designs together was actually the simplest part of this project. The most interactive pieces in this solution is where customer switch their workspaces on the test dashboard and where administrators invite new users and assign them with seats and permissions.

During my solve process, our design team was simultaneously launched the first design system. I needed to sync with the team to make sure the experiences that I delivered was most up to date, representing User Testing brand; in the meanwhile, I also contributed several impactful UI patterns extracted from this project into the design system, e.g. typeahead input. Those patterns are currently widely being used throughout the platform.

Execution, go-to- market strategy and success metrics

After several rounds of usability testing and design iterations, we shipped the experience with 2 slices in 2 quarters, with the intention to deliver customer values as fast as possible. With customer behavior data tracking and feedback channel implemented, we were able to constantly monitor customer satisfaction and areas for improvement. After 2 months of usage, we started the heal phase, targeting at paying off tech debt and fixing the bugs that we discovered after the launch. One of the big improvement in the 3rd milestone is to launch workspace archiving feature. We had predicted the need for archiving; instead of delivering that in the first slice, we punted till later when the need could potentially be stronger, once customers have more workspaces on their account. In this way, we could deliver the core functionality and business value of creating and managing workspaces way earlier.

Taking the product to market requires thorough planning between design, PM and product marketing. For each Beta and GA, my PM partner and I would analyze the first time user experience to the new features or improvements, and implement onboarding handholding experience with Appcues.

Within 6 months after initial Beta, 43% of our healthy enterprise customers adopted the solution. 92% of those customers claimed that they are satisfied with the solution, and would be very disappointed if they could no longer use this feature.

Reflection and learning

Workspaces management project was one of the first projects that demonstrated large-scale cross-functional collaboration at User Testing. Soon after starting to form a POV, I realized that this project would not be successful without getting the buy-in from stakeholders outside of product organizations. Throughout this project, the key to success at each step was to make sure that the solution we were testing and building maps back to business objectives and metrics. As a product designer, I sharpened my skills of communication and leadership quite a lot in those negotiation conversations with sales department and engineering team.