Segment-based Widgets
The community homepage is where Customer Success Managers and members of the Product team come together and exchange, discuss, and announce any product-related updates or events.
This homepage is absolutely customisable and can be built in accordance to reflect the company's visual language; these pages constitute various elements, the primary one being widgets.
The widgets are what builds 70% of our customers’ community homepage; Hence, they perform as one of the primary action areas for users to stay engaged within the platform, and further, take them towards the specific type of content they are seeking for.
Since the community homepage is visited by users belonging to various segments, we wanted to enhance their homepage experience by showing content that is most relevant to them.
The InSided community homepage saw an overall increase in egagement up by 40% after 3 month of the enhancement being rolled out. 80% of our customers also created new segments by themselves - this in turn added an additional layer of reporting which improved our customers’ insight on their user management.
how it started
We had numerous customer requests for a segment-based customisation after we rolled out an enhancement which only carried widget style-formatting updates. It was at that moment we knew — we have to deliver this 🙌🏽
the process we took
the design objective
Considering the limited bandwidth for this sprint, it was crucial for me to introduce the designs made in-line with the current flow and make this new feature, one that a user can seamlessly access, execute and understand with an almost zero learning curve.
My Role
I was responsible for all the designs from iteration drafts to high-fidelity mock-ups and prototyping. My role also included conducting interviews with users after each round of iterations to better understand and steer the designs in the right direction.
Our Approach
One of the most important things we needed to address was where to place these segment-based visibility settings for widgets?
‘Segments’ refers to a group of defined users. Today, segments can be created by an Admin (a power user) in the admin-view control settings page — this is where one can create, edit and delete user roles based on certain factors like:
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User Ranks
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Registration Date
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User Roles
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User Activity
or simply create and define a Custom Role.
We decided to house the segment-based visibility settings within the Edit side bar that slides in as soon as a widget is selected from the widget library.
The flow is illustrated as follows:
Final Designs
Widget Library
Widget Library
Preview Cards
Widget Edit Sidebar
Edit Bar Components:
Main Dropdown
Anatomy of the Edit Bar
Edit Bar variations
Conclusion
As we interviewed our customers with the final iteration of designs, we realised — though we may identify certain ‘wants’ during a product experience flow, it can only be materialised with visual aid.
In the beginning our customers only requested for an option to let users be able to assign certain widget views to a certain group of their users - after the designs went through its rounds, our customers realised they wanted this applicable in the Admin settings page as well. This has now given way to a whole new epic — one that will helps ease customisation while being able to increase user engagement by showing the right type of content to the right people.
Three months after we rolled out and adapted this very enhancement in our InSided homepage, we witnessed a 40% increase in our monthly average engagement which was a whopping jump!
Customers who had access to this enhancement were also seen to create new segments within their existing community database giving way to better user insights and management.