Project Overview

Project Summary & Areas of Opportunity

Essentially “Kickstart” was, and is (still a product line, still profitable for Verblio), a choose-your-own onboarding which aimed to accomplish two primary goals:

1. Improve retention and onboarding experience for Verblio customers, and

2. Further monetize new customers and get them primed for success in the platform

These one-off offerings ranged from the free post-sale demo or “guided tour” to our first-ever offerings ever of content/SEO strategy as a higher-end consulting package. It also includes a “jumpstart” with 10 topics generated by Verblio to get the customer/writers started, as well as a personalized setup of the account.

Customer problems to be solved and their respective products:

• Not understanding how to use our platform effectively (Guided Tour)

• Feeling lost and stuck with regard to coming up with topics to start (10 Topics)

• Not having time or resources to set up Verblio to its most powerful right away (Expert Account Setup)

• No SEO basics, keyword research; no idea how to approach content strategy (Content Strategy, Planning & Setup)

The Process

How I Helped

• Completed informal customer interviews to scope & determine which products would be of highest value to them

• Worked cross-departmentally in sprints with the developers, product manager, business development team, CEO, marketing team, and operations to design, make decisions, and execute the product with constraints of onboarding flow in mind

• Communicated key phases, steps, and KPIs to stakeholders and the broader team at weekly AllHands meetings; essentially served as “product owner”

• Selected calendar solution to use for scheduling features of guided tour, content strategy sessions—at outset, it was HubSpot to align with our CRM, but afterward we changed to integrate Calendly instead to incorporate round-robin features for the operational functionality

• Wireframed & designed the solutions to add Kickstart products permutatively

• Wrote UX copy

• Worked to get buy-in from key stakeholders on messaging covering multiple touchpoints, including product marketing in the onboarding flow and transactional email copy and “complete your scheduling” email flows to communicate next steps to customers across all relevant channels

• Rallied the team to complete deliverables on time, building buy-in with every presentation—presented Kickstart offering to board meeting

• Ensured Kickstart services were done at ~breakeven to increase take rate

• Piloted services design of all operational workflows of each product; tapped into current operations, expertise, and head count to reliably deliver the products; ensured scalable model & sketched plans to successfully scale up when concept was proven out

Mid-fidelity Prototype (before BlogMutt rebranded to Verblio, in 2018):

High-fidelity Prototype (Current State in 2022):

Main KPIs

• Take rate after signup, percentage of total signups

• Which services have a higher take rate than others, by persona segment (agency/business)

• Churn rate—theory: Kickstart offering delays churn, extends customer lifetime

• Are some offerings better at doing this than others, and if so, which?

• Fewer complaints/tickets on questions of strategy, topics, basic use-case questions (tracked in Zendesk)

Project Overview

Project Summary & Areas of Opportunity

With this project, we sought to accomplish the following goals:

• Establish a page suited to each of the industries Verblio writes for to answer the most commonly asked FAQ: “but how can you write for MY business / industry?”

• Establish long-form, SEO-rich landing pages with forms to collect information and distribute the industry-specific samples we accumulated for each of the 38 industries as a follow-up tactic

• Collect information as a source for marketing qualified leads that were extremely qualified, in regards to Verblio’s inbound customer funnel

• Use this project as a forcing function to begin establishing the brand voice in newly established Verblio’s content

• Use this project as a forcing function to increase our SEO footprint authentically and authoritatively across all industries, especially for the new domain of verblio.com

The Process

How I helped

• Developed wireframes of long-form landing page template to be used at all steps of creation of one page

• Collaborated to formalize the Verblio brand voice in newly established Verblio’s content with Verblio’s “voice”, our copywriter—concise, clear, punchy, engaging, spunky, and not at all pun-averse

• Built and directed a team of niche-specific Verblio freelance writers to adhere to the brand voice guidelines, stress-testing, iterating, and adding to those guidelines as we progressed through the project

• Provided industry-specific guidance/briefs to freelancers writing the pages to ensure FAQs I got frequently while I was in sales were addressed, among other directives

• Coordinated cross-departmentally with brand copywriter, dozens of freelancers, in-house graphic designer, and key stakeholders in leadership to efficiently and effectively usher the project over the finish line

• Maintain brand writing standards, adhere to SEO requirements and keywords, and abide by our design team’s visual brand guidelines

• Executed visual design (with some interactive elements!) & content editing within Verblio’s WordPress instance (using Beaver Builder), problem solved when text didn’t fit the template or freelancers took liberties

• Last review, line-editing, and punching up of existing copy, rewriting existing work as necessary

• Hooked up backend of form submitting to our CRM, email marketing drip campaigns through Zapier to ensure follow-up to form submissions and fostering of warm leads

• Effectively scaled processes to complete all 38 landing pages within allotted timeline, completing in batches

High-fidelity Prototype of legal landing page (Current State in 2023):

Project Overview

Project Summary & areas of opportunity

• Project Duration: 2.5 weeks, on-spec project, November-December 2022

• Team: 1, Kali Bizzul

• Tools: Figma, Optimal Workshop, Google Workspace

• Methods: Secondary Research, Contextual Inquiries, Card Sorting, User Interviews, Competitive & Comparative Analysis, Heuristic Analysis, Affinity Mapping, Persona Development, User Flows, User Journey Mapping, Site Map, Sketching, Wireframing, Usability Testing, Prototyping, Developing Components, Style Guide

Goals

Goal for users: To enable customers to buy books online directly through Read Queen’s website

Read Queen business goal: To gain and retain customers while competing on a local level with corporate behemoths like Amazon

Hypothesis

If we build an ecommerce feature directly into the Read Queen’s website for the redesign, it will enable them to increase lifetime value (LTV) of each customer, as well as translate their delightful in-person experience from in-person to digital.

How does Read Queen stack up against its local competition?

To get to the heart of this question, I had these research goals from the outset:

• Identify issues users have with navigating and completing simple tasks on Read Queen’s current website

• Explore what features or experiences a customer would want/need buying books or other items online

Competitive & Comparative Analysis

The competitive & comparative analysis highlighted that the current Read Queen website drastically underserves a competitive market, has little functionality including inability to browse books or buy online, and thus, prevents customers from making buying decisions. This is especially concerning given that Read Queen has only been in business for 2-3 years.

• This means that Read Queen’s desktop website as it stands is a barrier for current and potential new customers to a) make buying decisions through the help of product descriptions / reviews, and most importantly b) make purchases. The desktop site should be redesigned to hit these pain points.

The user interviews highlighted that users are savvy with buying books online from Amazon and other highly competitive entities and prefer to purchase online. Not surprisingly, cost emerges as the top factor determining online book purchases for users.

• This means that Read Queen needs to provide an ecommerce experience on their website to meet the needs of their customers to stay competitive in the space.

Key research Takeaways

1. Through usability testing, users couldn’t accomplish basic tasks, like browse books by genre, read book descriptions, or buy anything. It proved frustrating for the majority of users.

2. Most users interviewed wanted to actively support a local business over big corporate entities.

3. Users typically buy books online for ease & cost, especially after COVID-19.

4. Price wins out as top factor for users when buying books.

5. Bookstores need to support online browsing behaviors as it’s now a huge part of the customer journey in the space. Any that don’t will lag in supporting prior and potential customers.

After completing an open card sort of Read Queen’s inventory with a few users through Optimal Workshop, I reorganized the Read Queen’s information architecture and sitemap. This sitemap allows for an efficient way for Em to accomplish their goals as shown in the above userflows.

The high fidelity version of the mid-fidelity wireframes are shown here.

The goal was threefold: 1) allow Em to sort by genre, 2) learn more about Read Queen as a business, and 3) build out a checkout process to allow Em to purchase a children’s book as a gift.

Between rounds of mid-fidelity and high-fidelity prototypes, I conducted a second round of usability testing. In the end, I was able to design a solution to nearly double the SUS score from before the redesign, as well as eliminate any tasks failed.

Through this process, I identified and implemented the following design iterations as expressed by users:

• Online consumers expect a more minimal ‘order complete’ page so I pared it back

• After customers completed a purchase, they wanted to continue browsing by ‘you may like’ versus browsing by category, so I removed that section

• The search bar is more useful in main navigation vs. nestled on product page

• The button to ‘cancel’ was ambiguous for users in the checkout process, ‘cancel + keep shopping’ was suggested

Learnings & next steps

• Users really appreciated being able to continue shopping even after making purchase, which is a pain point on other websites — plus, a value-add for the business!

• Is a ‘home’ button with an icon necessary versus just clicking the business’s logo? Split between those tested

• Should we build a more ‘dynamic’ representation of cart, including notification-like functionality that updates each time the user adds to the cart?

• Project Duration: 3-week sprint, on-spec project, December 2022-January 2023

• Team: Kali Bizzul, Bailey Alexander, Abby Laing, Sarai Aguayo

• Tools: Figma, Trello, Canva, Google Workspace, Zoom, Slack

• Methods: Secondary Research, Contextual Inquiries, User Interviews, Competitive & Comparative Analysis, Heuristic Analysis, Accessibility Analysis, Affinity Mapping, Persona Development, User Flows, User Journey Mapping, Site Map, Service Design Blueprint, Storyboarding, Sketching, Wireframing, Usability Testing, Prototyping, Developing Components, Style Guide

Goals

Goal for user:

Petsmart business goal for providers:

Preview of Mobile Prototypes

Flow 1: The internal flow for the provider, the vet tech

Flow 2: The flow for the user, the pet parent