Margaret Hoang
Product designer striving to nurture society and tear down tech barriers through UX design.
Member Experience Research
for Covenant Eyes
Gain a deep understanding of our customers' early experience with our service, from discovery to purchase and setup.
| Roles |
|---|
| Researcher |
| Project lead |
| Skills |
|---|
| User interviews |
| Customer journey mapping |
| Service blueprinting |
| Persona creation |
| Tools |
|---|
| Miro |
| Condens |
| Duration |
|---|
| 3 months |
Identify pains and gains in sign-up and setup
The Covenant Eyes core product was undergoing a variety of changes and expanding its offerings. In this midst of this exciting season, there was a growing sense in the company that we needed to clearly understand what customers were experiencing in the early stages of their use of our service.As lead researcher on this project, my goals were to:
Learn, analyze, and communicate what our core user encounters in their first weeks and months with us
Expand our understanding of customers' pain points and explore how we might address them
Identify specific challenges experienced by internal employees with our sign-up and setup processes
Explore members' stories to reduce uncertainty
Coming soon: How user interviews formed a journey map and provided another perspective on sign-up / setup challenges
Expand detail on internal challenges
Coming soon: How a service blueprint was created from internal interviews and what sprint projects came out of the service blueprintOutcome: Email confirmation
Give a human face to members' lives and needs
Coming soon: How I created a persona from the user interviews
Outcomes and lessons learned
Email confirmation, Smart Sign-up
Smart Sign-up & Onboarding
for Covenant Eyes
Make it simpler for couples and families to set up Screen Accountability™.
| Roles |
|---|
| Designer |
| Project lead |
| Skills |
|---|
| Wireframing |
| Interaction design |
| Usability testing |
| Project planning |
| Tools |
|---|
| Miro |
| Figma |
| Duration |
|---|
| 8 months |
Streamline sign-up for people helping others
Screen Accountability™ empowers strugglers to take ownership of their online activity to quit or avoid porn. While the software is designed for individuals, oftentimes parents and spouses sign up for the service to help a loved one. Smart Sign-up was an effort to improve this key part of our service, where new customers were experiencing a lot of frustration.As primary designer and project lead, I set out to:
Understand who is signing up for our service
Clarify the interactions for setting up family members on a new account
Simplify installation of the Covenant Eyes service on new devices
Unify teams to solve usability problems
Building off user research conducted earlier, I sketched out the pain points to solve, both for new customers and our Member Care agents. Over several months, I made a case for prioritizing Smart Sign-up with our product manager, VP of product, and various internal stakeholders. Several iterations of wireframes and strategy discussions I led resulted in a design structure that ultimately met everyone's core needs.
Maintaining sign-up conversion rates was an important guardrail in the design strategy. I worked closely with our marketing web strategist to ensure the stability of sign-up and test iterations. We achieved this through:
Reaching out to marketing leads to understand their team's needs and processes
Progressively release changes under feature flag to protect the current sign-up flow
Collaborating with business intelligence to A/B test each iteration
Chart a path for design and development
Overhauling our entire sign-up & setup flow required dividing complexity into smaller steps. I sketched out phases of work and worked with the product manager and service owner to refine and position slices into the roadmap. Throughout the project, I met frequently with developers to align on direction and release sequence.
Solve customer pain points with better UX
The heart of Smart Sign-up was a simple question—who is the user here to help? After incorporating a question to get to know the user's goals in Sign-up, I was able to craft the new onboarding process. One path was tailored to those helping themselves and another to those helping others.
Our previous sign-up / setup process involved many steps to create an account, add users, and install apps. Where possible, I selected strategic defaults for the user to minimize setup. When complexity could not be avoided, I looked for creative ways to reduce cognitive load.
A major challenge in setting up Screen Accountability™ was knowing if the service was successfully installed or not. My main innovation in Smart Sign-up was to add a check for the user to be able to know if their device was detected by our service or not. This gives the user confidence they have set up at least one device and Screen Accountability™ is working for them.
As the core interactions took shape, it was time to make my designs ready for development. My approach included:
Utilizing our design components to maintain visual consistency
Collaborating with Marketing on language and tone
Consulting communication designers on visuals and pacing
Test designs with real users
Once I had a prototype for the Smart Sign-up path for spouses and families, I conducted usability testing with three users recruited from an online design community. While this study did not require testing with prospective customers, these participants were Christians, our target audience.
From testing, I learned that participants experienced confusion with some of the core service concepts. It was also evident that a gentler pacing would better serve towards providing clarity—sometimes a few more steps are better if they are simpler to understand.
Keeping each screen focused around providing a particular action or displaying feedback to the user would lower cognitive load and increase focus. The usability testing also provided more fuel for a separate initiative to clarify service concepts.
Learn and adapt how I work
Usability testing eliminates guesswork and makes it possible to iterate quickly on designs. If I were doing Smart Sign-up over again, I would try to budget and advocate for additional usability testing in other stages of the project. The one test conducted, however, greatly streamlined our path to a more polished version of the feature, allowing us to make improvements before the first release.
Collaboration is time intensive but yields huge returns in organizational unity and creating robust designs that meet both internal and customer needs. My many hours spent in meetings with stakeholders and team leads across the company made it possible to develop the momentum needed to keep Smart Sign-up at the table and see it through to completion.