Survey Monkey - User Experience Designer Lead - 1/11 - 1/12 (zoomerang.com)
In 2011 I had the opportunity to work with the small team at zoomerang.com to significantly advance the way that people conducted surveys online. Zoomerang was a long time leader in the onluine survey space but had not invested heavily in ongoing UX. At some point in 2010 they saw their largest competitor SurveyMonkey begin to take marketshare and decided to make the UX investment it had neglected. In this role I led a complete redesign of of the zoomerang experience that ultimately led to SurveyMonkey's aquisition of Zoomerang in late 2011
Address book and design patterns
While at SurveyMonkey I redesigned the survey address book. This included adding features which allowed users to import data from many sources and easily organize into panels or distribution lists that could be easily accessed and used for survey distribution. This included efforts to automate the isolation and management of duplicate, bounced and opt-out addresses as well as the easiest way to group by demographic details and generate smart distribution lists.
Survey creation experience
In my first 90 days with zoomerang i took stock of existing metrics, ran heuristics, and conducted usability studies to help identify areas of focus. All seemed to point to the survey creation process as the biggest area for improvement. In particular it seemed many users would start to create surveys and abandon their efforts at various points in the process.
While addressing this area first I wanted to set design and interaction models as a platform for development of future areas such as analytics, address book etc...
Through ongoing discovery efforts I was able to identify 4 main themes in the UX that specifically needed to be improved.
Clarity and focus
Context
Reduction of unnecessary complexity
Optimization for the most common use cases
After 8 months of rapid design, testing, development and iteration we saw dramatic increases in our core metrics including a 215% increase in the number of users who successfully launched surveys.
Survey results
As a follow on to our success with survey creation we quickly translated our learnings to survey analytics and continued to design, test, develop and iterate.
