Respondent is a marketplace that connects Researchers and Participants for market analysis, research studies, and product validation.

Project

Activation: New customers were not converting

Situation

As the acting product manager and designer on the activation team I identified an opportunity to improve conversion. My hypothesis was that the form was too long. Our goals were to increase sign up to pay 12% ⟶ 16% conversion (3 mo. rolling basis, 25% EOY) and to decrease amount of time it took to complete form from 1.2 ⟶ 45 min.

Obstacles

This was my first time acting as both a product manager and designer owning a product area. It was a challenge leaning on my data analyst to come up with quantitative goals as I hadn’t had space to do work like that before, let alone create a business case and convince my team that the venture was worthwhile.

Action

I reviewed past design iterations, existing research, completed a competitive analysis, and outlined any known problems. Once open questions were identified, I created a research plan and met with stakeholders and engineering to identify needs and constraints and created a product requirements doc and timeline. I also created some designs to support my research. I conducted research which disproved my hypothesis and learned:

Form was not too long - just frustrating to use

Too many popups

Some patterns were outdated

Parts of the form were not visible

Lack of transparency (matching, cost)

Results

I revised my design solutions based on the findings, created a product requirements document “aka pitch” for engineering, socialised the newly identified problems, solutions, and priorities with team, created a plan to roll out short term changes via “quick wins”, while keeping in mind a plan for long term full redesign dependent on front-end system change and design system work. While I was not able to measure any of my work against my goals due to a layoff, I was confident in my design work and the solutions defined and shipped.

What did I learn?

Respondent was my first role as both a product manager and designer. I learned a lot about how to frame problems, create quantitative goals, and prioritise design problems amongst engineering must-haves. While my time at Respondent was cut short due to pandemic-related cuts, it was definitely a defining experience for me.