Investigating the value of local homepages
Role:
Lead designer, Independent
end-to-end project
Tools used:
Figma, Lucid, MUIQ
Timeline:
July to October, 2023
Project details
HubSpot is a CRM platform that provides inbound marketing, sales, automation, and customer service software.
Because HubSpot is so feature rich, it can be difficult for customers to familiarize with the product offerings, and get to value quickly.
In Q3 2023, I was selected to lead concept validation work for a project called local homepages. This was a great opportunity for me to challenge myself since this work had the potential to impact the entire product. I knew this project would entail tons of cross-team and cross-discipline outreach, lots of stakeholder and collaboration management, and would fully engage my entire UX skillset.
In Q2 of 2023, members of the navigation and automation team proposed a strategy called the “Homes and Workspaces” project that had the potential to help our customers get to value faster. Here’s how they identified the problem.
We put a heavy burden on customers to navigate through menus of tools to understand how to discover value.
The problem
Introducing new “Homes and Workspaces” pages could help customers more readily understand how to put HubSpot tools and features to work. More specifically, these new pages could address:
Disconnected experiences
Inconsistent tool education
Tool confusion
Lack of visibility across tools, teams, and goals
All of these core issues lead to slow time to value.
The concept
This team’s work served as a rallying cry that tee’d up some very promising possibilities. One of the main questions that stemmed from this work was, “Should we build these new local homepage experiences?” More specifically, should we have category-specific local homepages for areas of the product, like:
Automation
Reporting
Sales
Commerce
The key question
Breaking it down into manageable pieces
There was a ton of ambiguity at play, so I began by considering the answers I needed to get to by the end of the project. The following questions formed from that thought exercise:
What is a local homepage comprised of?
What kind of content would best resonate for customers on a local homepage?
Automation was used as a pilot use case
What might a lo-fidelity concept look like?
Considering the approach
Knowing the end destination helped me to determine the path I wanted to take. I knew I’d need to fill in some research gaps, especially as it related to the kind of information customers would want to see on an automation or reporting local homepage.
I also knew I needed to keep other teams I didn’t work with in the loop, to keep them engaged, informed, and empowered along the way. So I established a work principle for myself of total transparency. That meant having many conversations across many groups, and sharing artifacts early and often. I shared my plan and UX brief in trafficked Slack channels to bring visibility to the work.
Key research learnings
Before delving too far into the work, I needed to get a better grasp of the core problems to solve in both the Automation and Reporting feature areas.
After conducting non-customer surveys, and customer co-design sessions, I had a solid understanding of how local homepages could address critical customer challenges.
Surveys:
I surveyed 100 non-HubSpot automation participants who self identified as basic / intermediate users
Co-design sessions:
I conducted 10 co-design sessions with customers ranging from self-identified novice users to expert users in their feature area.
We learned:
One size fits none - user segments are different enough that they need more personalized experiences focused on their unique goals
Performance focused - Visibility into automation health and outcomes is the universal concern across all user types
It became clear that beginner and advanced users needed vastly different experiences, as one group was focused on demystification of tools and overall empowerment, while the other was focused on efficiency and optimization.
Defining the content strategy
All of this upfront work gave me high confidence that we’d arrived at the right:
Purpose for local homepages
The pain points the page types should address
The importance of each of these areas
How that experience might change depending on skill comfort
How that experience might change based on their product usage and onboarding data
A way to scale this approach across every product area
Setting the vision
One of the things I knew I needed to produce was a lo-fi example of what a local homepage could look like. The one shown here is specific to the automation area of the product, but could have been extended to other product areas given the extensibility of these content types.
The goal here was to:
Illustrate the content hierarchy in order of importance
Show content types in context
Convey the role of the content type when applied in context
Not be overly prescriptive so teams felt hamstrung to this exact application
I knew this would work for the automation group, but was leaving room for it to scale to fit the needs of other groups.
Establishing content categories and guidelines
The discovery and research work resulted in four core content categories with 11 variations of those categories.
Each content type had a role to play
Recommendations for when to use it
Brief contextual examples
Note: This work was directional. In the next phase of work I planned to document editorial standards, and build into Figma components with the Design System team.
These patterns and guidelines were created to help other teams see what content could be helpful at the category page level, acting as a system of components to pull from and apply in a relevant way.
Outcome
🎉
The project got funded
Local homepages were built by four different teams
Teams are still utilizing my research and strategy long after my departure
During my time on this project:
I Determined what a guiding strategy should look like,
Defined how the experience could differ for different types of customers, and
Created a vision for what content should be created and how it would work in context
“This project was ambitious, and Libbie unquestionable delivered beyond expectations. Upon completing her analysis, she confidently created and shared decks and Loom recordings, presenting her ideas across the organization.
Multiple projects addressing her ideas are currently in flight as a result of her work.”