SurveyMonkey, 2022
Status: released
Duration: ~ 1 year
Role: Project Design Lead

Unification

Goal

SurveyMonkey’s Customer Experience (CX) solution consisted of three separate platforms: GetFeedback Direct, GetFeedback Digital, and Console. The goal of this project was to create the first increment of a single platform experience by unifying these platforms.

Unification of GetFeedback Direct, GetFeedback Digital and Console.

Outcome

We built a new, shared navigation experience to connect all three platforms in the frontend. This way, users were able to navigate all three platforms as if they were one. Technically, they were still moving between three platforms.

The unified platform, branded as GetFeedback.

User problem

In 2019, SurveyMonkey acquired two CX companies: GetFeedback and Usabilla. With these acquisitions, SurveyMonkey’s CX solution consisted of three platforms: GetFeedback, Usabilla, and Console (aka Usabilla 2.0). To bring the platforms together, GetFeedback and Usabilla were rebranded to GetFeedback Direct and GetFeedback Digital, respectively. The rebrand featured a new GetFeedback logo, new typeface and colors. To increase feature usage, navigation links were added that let users jump from one platform to another.

These changes, however, confused customers, as they were now moving between platforms that looked alike, but were still very different in terms of content and organization of content. Also, the navigation links only let customers jump between some platforms, not all. Customers didn’t understand which platform they were in, and how to get back to where they came from.

Business problem

CX sales were not great. For sales folks, it was hard to sell for cross-platform use cases as our platforms were still very disconnected. Also, having to maintain three platforms with similar features was costly and slowed down new feature development.

GetFeedback Direct.

GetFeedback Digital.

Console.

Solution

We created a single platform experience by unifying the three platforms in the frontend. This way, technically, each platform still used its own backend, still contained its own pages, but the way to get to these pages had changed.

To achieve this, we defined a new information architecture (IA) to help users find the right content across the three platforms. We designed a new, shared global left-side navigation bar, informed by the IA. This navigation bar replaced the existing left-side nav bar of each platform. We designed new landing pages for each of the nav menu items and designed a new, shared header component to support consistent back behavior and title placement across the platforms. We didn’t change the main content area of each page for the first release, so it was still different for each platform in terms of framework and components. This was definitely not ideal, but we wanted to make sure to deliver fast and iteratively. Lastly, we merged user accounts, so customers were able to move between pages across platforms using one instead of three accounts, and removed similar features.

Part of the information architecture of the unified platform experience.

Navigation components for the new, shared navigation experience.

First increment of a unified homepage, replacing the homepage of each platform.

Surveys page, providing access to all the user’s surveys, across platforms.

Example of a level 2-page. The main content area of these pages was left untouched for the first release.

Challenges

We faced many challenges during this project, the biggest of them being the lack of a unification manual. I worked closely with senior leadership at the start of this project and we all had years of experience delivering products and features. Figuring out how to unify three platforms that used to be two companies was a whole different game. Understanding the problem space was easy, but choosing the right solution was hard. Finding the right balance between, among other things, customer value, engineering effort, level of customer disruption, and required changes to internal processes, was difficult. We chose to prioritize delivering fast and iteratively and anticipated customer frustration. 

Another challenge we faced was getting stakeholder buy-in and making people feel part of our efforts. With this project being so disruptive not just to our product offering but to the entire organisation, getting people excited and involved was essential. Organizing interactive sessions with all the teams in our CX org was one of the best ways we achieved this. We got visual immediately. This helped to make sure we all spoke the same language. I created several Figma prototypes to demonstrate our concepts and final solution end-to-end, which evolved based on feedback we got.

Example of a prototype made to kickstart discussions with stakeholders.