Adding recommended features on a dashboard that had been normally ignored by users
Insights
A large majority of users came to MailChimp’s homepage and jumped immediately to other pages. Meanwhile, many users were unaware of our marketing automations and new features.
Mailchimp users are busy small business owners, and they are not experts in marketing. They want us to give them prioritized, personalized and achievable actions.
We brainstormed and narrowed down our directions to three concepts. We then showed the three medium-fidelity design mockups to users for only 5 seconds each to mimic the real environment.
The results showed that one version had the most positive emotional reactions, however, they didn’t recall the contents very well. On the other side, another version had the best content recall rate and users loved the simplicity. We decided to combine both approaches to achieve good content recall and emotional resonance.
Two months after we launched the beta version, we know that the beta does not tested well against our success metric: percentage of users who start trying recommendations from the homepage.
We were trying to solve two problems at the same time. One was to fix the problem of the current dashboard, and the other was to increase feature adoption. Our solution was to add recommended features on a dashboard that has been normally ignored by users. If I had a chance to redo this project, I would focus on making the current dashboard more useful before running feature adoption experiments on it.
Methods: analytics review, concept testing.
