Superset: integrating new users after a company acquisition
Combining workflows to create a unified user experience
Two workflows with great potential
My company acquired one of its competitors and began the task of winning over their customers and transitioning them to our products. I led the research that took the best of their product, and the best of ours, to create a new referral workflow that lovingly came to be known as Superset.
The problem:
Search
Users needed to be able to search for resources that would help their client, including leveraging the client’s information to tailor the search recommendations, and the ability to refine the list further with filters and sorting.
Share
They needed to be able to select resources from the search, and organize them for the client so they can share those resources in print, email, or text format without having to copy and paste text.
Refer
Users needed to be able to identify helpful services from the search results, and refer the client using the internal system to refer clients to trusted partners in their community on their client’s behalf.
In addition to this, our goal was to make the NowPow users excited to migrate to our platform, and Unite Us users to feel delight in the new experience.
The problem my team was faced with was to create a design that allowed both of our users and our competitors’ users to complete two workflows in the same experience, without losing dealbreaker functionality for either user group. The design required that users could:
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Initial discovery
Conduct workflow mapping in each experience.
Define user journeys in each experience.
Compare overlaps in the experiences and prepare to test for preference among users.
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Field research and team design sprint
I trained designers and PMs and led field research that included observation of users and interviews.
We identified areas of friction for users in both company’s products.
We held a three-day, cross-functional design sprint to integrate findings and begin prototyping.
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User feedback and iteration
I conducted user sessions with 20 users across both companies to walk through the new flow and get feedback.
I generated two artifacts: a report of findings with recommended solutions, and a video we showed at an all-hands meeting.
As we iterated be broke the workflow down into smaller components to conduct more in-depth testing. I conducted 8 additional studies over the course of 6 months.
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Usability and language testing
I partnered with designers to create a clickable prototype, and conducted remote, moderated, user testing sessions with 10 users - 5 from each company.
Tests surfaced confusion about terminology. I held focus groups, mixing users from both companies, to discuss language and find terms that made sense to both user groups.
Key metrics:
Users adopted the flow:
80% of migrated users completed the full workflow within the first week after release.
The flow is intuitive:
95% of users making a referral are using the intended happy path.
The flow is faster:
Time to complete the workflow was cut in half.