Stack Overflow for Teams Homepage (SAAS)

Overview:

A personalized, action orientated home UX that focuses on the incentives of our users in order to increase product stickiness.

Role: Lead designer -> Product manager  |  Time: 2 months from research -> ship  |  Reach: Enterprise customers

Problem Statement:

Picture this: A SAAS product without a homepage. No home for new users to learn and become active users. No home for existing users to view and take actions on content that aligns to their expertise. Users were lost in a sea of irrelevant posts, newbies were dropping like flies, and our existing users were waving goodbye (and our customer retention numbers told us so).

Our Solution:

We dissected the Quant for insights, we talked directly to users to understand their top tasks / JTBD when the think about Teams. After our research we focused on the following concepts:

Personalization, Personalization, Personalization

• Show users content that is relevant to them based on their activity and preferences.
• Present the primary actions users can do to help their community. EX: Reid asked a question that you can answer!
• Your contributions: show users contributions and promote actions to take the next step.
• We even built a recommendation system in order to get users to watch tags and follow communities

Focus on the incentives for users to take action

• Show the impact of users contributions and how many colleagues they have helped.
• Show the rep users have earned
• Show the badges that they are on track to get

Design Process:

Our approach was methodical and data-driven. We conducted thorough research to understand user behavior and preferences. We then iteratively designed and tested prototypes to ensure the effectiveness of our solutions.

We then shipped out features incrementally, first to a sub-set of business users as the feedback and release cycles are much quicker. After a few cycles we felt confident to release to our enterprise tiers. From there we have continued to iterate based on user feedback and have shipped iterations in the sub-sequential releases.

Implementation and Impact:

Since implementing the redesigned homepage, we’ve seen significant improvements. Some quant stats post 3 months of shipping to enterprise customers:

• New user activation increased by 16%
• CURR improved by 9%
• Additionally, qualitative feedback from users has been overwhelmingly positive.

Lessons Learned:

Any content feed UX needs to be dynamic enough to not come off as stale. The biggest feedback we got (and the hardest solution) was that the content we showed users often become stale after a few weeks of viewing. Our algorithm wasn’t refreshing content and we didn’t provide users with actions to curate.

Next Steps:

In conclusion, our efforts to enhance Stack Overflow for Teams have been met with success. Moving forward, we will continue to prioritize user experience and leverage data-driven insights to drive further improvements.