BTP: Renovating Home with Griffin Drigotas
Behind the Pixels is a conversational blog series that aims to give a glimpse into the work & life of being a designer at Klaviyo
AH: Let’s start off by having you introduce yourself — how long have you been a product designer and how long have you been at Klaviyo, which is a decently long time at this point!
GD: It’s crazy. My name is Griffin. I’ve been a product designer for four or five years now. I didn’t study product design at all — totally self taught — I started off doing graphic design, and then joined a startup in Boston where I was their first design hire. There, I did all of the marketing design stuff and all of the product stuff. After about a year, I wanted to stop doing marketing so made the switch fully into product design. So I would say probably a full four years now. I joined Klaviyo April 1, 2020 right when the pandemic was kicking off and have been here ever since doing product design, loving it.
AH: That was a great day for me since you were coming to help on my team! Okay, you’ve done lots of projects since then, but recently you were on a very tricky, very well known page of the product. Can you give a little introduction into what we’re talking about today?
GD: Yes, so most recently, and I guess not too recently, it’s been about a year, have been working on Klaviyo’s homepage. This was a page that, as far as I know, hasn’t been touched since Klaviyo was first released back in 2013. So it’s a page that customers are very used to and comfortable with. And we really just wanted to, one, update the UI of it to start matching the rest of our app as we’ve been improving it, and two, present information for our users that’s a little bit more relevant than just listing out all of your flows and all of your campaigns that are happening in a certain time period. A primary goal was to make things a little bit more specific with some more actionable data that allows us to drive users directly into that content to make changes and view results far quicker.
AH: Connecting it to the rest of the app and also correcting some information too which is good. The team had some changes and switches during the time you worked on it. Maybe a little bit of context around the team?
GD: Most recently, we’re made up of three engineers, a PM and myself on the design side. We also have a design researcher and a product analyst who’ve both been supporting the team as well. But over the past year, we’ve had a little bit of turnover and some PMs that have been shifting. Four different PMs have come in and out of the project over the last year which has been super interesting, you know, dealing with different processes and mindsets, thoughts, goals, and having to level-set over the year and make sure everyone’s on the same page as it’s changed so much.
AH: Yeah, of course which answers my question about the difficulties of a shifting team. So then maybe talk to us about the research phase. What were you all researching and what were some of the findings?
GD: So research… We started off, like I said a year ago, and really our main focus was just on ‘Hey, what’s working on this page, what’s not working for you?’ and how can we be improving that? So that was one of our biggest focuses. I guess it’s kind of weird because we didn’t end up shipping a lot of the stuff that we had originally researched and focused on, and it ended up being a reskin of the old UX, but a lot of [the original research] was focused on how we could be improving. Understanding where people go from home, and how we can make that faster and easier for our users. In the original home, you could click into certain campaigns and flows, but there’s really only revenue data tied to that. On top of that, we learned that people really just jump into reports right away. People want to be able to understand some more data right away. So understanding what level of information people want to see when they first jump into Klaviyo and then where they go after that.
AH: So you all found that home actually might serve a different purpose than it was originally used for, but then you ended up realizing that your scope couldn’t solve some of the bigger issues. Do you want to talk about how you found other areas needed to be improved in order to eventually get to the place that you wanted to go with home?
GD: For sure. Flows is a good example of that. Our campaigns list page, for example, has all of your campaigns listed out and you can search, filter, and see all of the data attached to each campaign. But within the last year, you weren’t able to do that on the flows list page. That space was really just a list of all of your flows with some of the logic listed out in the details, but there was no data tied to that. So users were having to rely on the homepage because that was the only place where you could see a list of all your flows that were live during a certain time period with the revenue tied to it. We heard from users that it didn’t really make sense for you to be relying on the homepage to be looking at all of that data. So we thought, let’s also take a step back, use some of our engineering resources, design resources, product resources, and look at a flows list page, revamp that as well so then we can use home in a more effective way. We don’t need to overload home with data. We can use the flows list page, give people information that they want to be seeing there and then utilize the homepage as more of an entry point that’s giving you that high level information without having to overload you with all that other data.
AH: Yes, you all may not have been able to do it all in the first pass, but I like that we’re starting to unload a few things and make home not take on so much of the burden of reporting. Feels like a good long term goal.
So then thinking about the creative process and some of the tools that we use, was there a particular brainstorm or activity that you did while coming up with concepts that was particularly helpful?
GD: So less about specific tools or activities, I’ve found that oftentimes it’s designers who are popping into brainstorms and thinking through stuff. However, I’ve been super fortunate to work with engineers who are very good product-thinkers as well. I make an effort to bring my team members who are engineers or PMs, product analysts, researchers all into that room so everyone can have a say. I personally like to give everyone that voice because I don’t particularly like a relationship with engineers where I make choices and then just pass things over to engineers, saying, ‘Here, do this, do that’ — I want them to feel empowered. So it’s definitely a learning curve, because engineers aren’t always product-focused. But over the last year, I’ve seen tremendous growth from them being able to think through things and then it helps down the line when you’re a QA-ing, trying to release things, or make some decisions where your engineers end up providing that [product] feedback. It’s just getting more people to have that keen eye when it comes to making product decisions. It’s been really cool and fun to see the growth across our entire team and having people have that confidence to make decisions and raise questions when things might not look right. I can only do so much and catch so much stuff. I tried to catch everything, but even just in the last couple of days of QA-ing home both of our engineers have brought things to my attention that I hadn’t noticed before, which is pretty cool.
AH: I can attest, they’re great. And just the idea of co-creation with the team is a pretty cool way to work. Then on the engineering side, did you all run into any technical limitations? And how did you adjust?
GD: Yes, for sure. During all of this, we’ve been revamping our design system. So that definitely has played a role because we have been using a lot of new components that were just being built. We were the guinea pigs there and, happy to do it — happy to use some of our new cards, use some of our new tables, some of our new drop downs. But there’s also some things that might have been overlooked when those new components were originally being built. So we had the opportunity to basically do an extended deep-dive QA on those components, to make sure that they were actually fitting the needs for everything like in-app that’s going to be using it. Home was one of the first teams to use quite a few components.
Load times are another technical limitation we dealt with. We’ve had a huge request since we released the product to add more timeframes and custom timeframes. So it’s this really interesting balance between how much we can give to our users because we know that they want these certain things versus giving them an optimal experience. Like technically we can give users the ability to go back in time as far as possible, but we run into some loading issues there. Pages may timeout or pages may take a very long time to load and that’s really not a good user experience for our users. So we’ve decided to cap it at 180 days in the past, which should give users ample timeframes to do the reporting comparisons that they want to be doing, especially on home, and then they can then dive deeper into say the Overview dashboard or different reporting surfaces and do more in depth reporting there, where there’s not as much data that might need to be loaded or those might just be built in a different way that they are able to load all that information quicker.
AH: It goes back to what you said, if the true purpose of home is not to be a deep dive reporting area. Do you need to have deep-dive analytic features on there? But then we need to have those available somewhere else.
GD: For sure. It’s been a reporting surface historically, and I almost don’t view it as a reporting surface. Home is a surface where you get a gauge of what’s happening in the now and then you can dive in deeper and look at specific flows or campaigns, individual ones or marketing initiatives in those product areas as a whole and go to those areas to look at the overall performance. You probably don’t need to do that on home.
AH: This is a really good segue into my next question about change aversion. So you’re saying home has historically been used as a reporting space where people relied on it for certain analytics they couldn’t find elsewhere and it’s also the most trafficked page in Klaviyo. How did you all balance knowing that there would definitely be change aversion versus making changes for the eventual good in the long term, even if we’re not there quite yet?
GD: Absolutely. So I think overall at Klaviyo and especially with this project, we’re really focused on looking at the data and trying to understand what success means for our users. So I mean, one of the things we look at internally is like an “FII score”, which stands for fast, intuitive, and inspirational. It’s these three pillars of our design team that we try to focus on when we ship features and make product decisions. So yes, change happens. Change might not be loved by everyone initially, but we know, based off of looking at that data, that these changes that we’ve implemented are actually helping users immediately. We’re increasing the speed in which users can do things. The FII score increased by over 14 percent, with an average 35% increase in a task success rate, and a 15% increase in speed compared to the old home. So it’s those kinds of things that we’re more focused and putting more emphasis on than we are on changing things and having users be frustrated by those changes that we’re making. We know that things might have moved or look different, but they’re completing their tasks faster and more effectively in Klaviyo which really is our main goal.
AH: Totally. What was the biggest challenge to overcome in the process of building home?
GD: I think the personnel changes were definitely difficult, and with that there were some changing and competing priorities during the process which made it difficult to navigate. But I think that the biggest thing is that home captures so many different product areas, and there’s so many different opinions and people who care deeply about their individual product areas. It’s kind of a unique place to be working on a feature that touches literally everything. In a lot of the work I’ve done so far, I was really focused on just flows, just campaigns or just a certain report, but this was a feature that we needed to go out and get buy-in from stakeholders across the entire company (plus our customers, plus CSMs, plus leaders). It was an all hands on deck effort across Klaviyo and that was a little bit challenging to navigate at times because there are so many differing opinions and priorities when it comes to these different product areas and finding that balance between them all.
AH: 100% — on the flip side, what are you most proud of thinking back across the process?
GD: That we shipped it [Laughs]. But no, I go back to that data and I’ve been very happy to see we’re hitting the numbers that we want to be hitting and, at the end of the day, we know that we are providing more value to our users than they were getting before.
AH: And it’s not the end, which leads to my next question — like you said, it ended up being more of a reskin with some quality of life improvements, but sounds like there’s more coming. Can you tease any of the things that you’re thinking about as we go forward?
GD: Yeah, it’s gonna get faster, it’s gonna get more accessible. But there’s also a lot of work that’s happening that’s going to make the entire reporting journey a lot better. From the homepage all the way through to individual objects. This is just the beginning of a much larger reporting initiative that we are undertaking on the design and product side at Klaviyo.
AH: Very exciting. Okay, final question, any advice for other designers who might be working on a very visible piece of their product, like home?
GD: Talk to as many people as you possibly can! Make sure everyone is aware early and often about ideas, thoughts, concepts that you have. Don’t be afraid to take and make bold decisions, because that’s really the only way to spark change and make progress. When you have ideas, speak up and challenge other people’s opinions as well. People aren’t always gonna love what you’re doing, but at the end of the day, you have the most knowledge around that particular product area. I’ve been working on it for a year, there’s been a lot of people who came in and out of it — have the confidence to speak up and make firm decisions, but also be able to back them up data at the same time.
🏡 🚧 — Redoing the most visited page in a product is no small feat. My compliments to Griffin & team. Excited for the future of home and the overall Klaviyo analytics experience!
Does taking on the big challenges sound up your alley? We’re always looking for great people to join our team.
