👯 Sharing + Collaboration

🧩 The problem

Working on projects together in SurveyMonkey was challenging. We had some disparate sharing features that were hard to find and hard to use. Plus, we had inconsistent CTAs across the product that made it difficult for people to know what to expect.

For example, in 2 parts of the product we had the CTA ‘Add collaborators’. In one part, this would trigger an invite modal to add people to your team. In another, it would trigger the ability to share your survey with another account. This made a messy and confusing experience!

💡The plan

We wanted to:

• Understand customer’s motivation for collaborating in SurveyMonkey.

• Conduct a site wide audit to determine where we had an opportunity to better leverage features we already have.

• Find ways to make it a smoother, more intuitive experience.

🧠 My role

We started by collaborating with research to understand why people collaborate and what pain points exist. From there, I mapped out how sharing works across the product and did an audit of our CTAs. This helped us identify where there were inconsistencies and gaps.

I collaborated with product and design to shape the roadmap and figure out what order the changes needed to rollout. I worked closely with engineering to make sure all features + CTAs were connecting the way I’d mapped out. Once ready for testing, I did an in depth copy QA to make sure final copy made it into the product and identify which gaps to tackle next.

🔍 My process

Once I mapped out the CTAs and share experience, I did user testing to identify which existing terms resonated most with customers. Then, I made recommendations for what CTAs should be across the product to launch which collaboration actions.

A huge goal of this was to link features together, rather than having disparate sharing features. I was a key part in ensuring the flow of information made sense throughout the product. I was tracking which features would launch when so I knew when we could leverage them in the sharing journey.

Another large piece of this is permissions. There are varying level of permissions you can have with sharing. These are determined by your account type, role on the team, and what survey specific permissions you’ve been granted. I worked closely with engineering to make sure we were aligned on what copy people would see depending on their permission set.

Permission table for engineering to show backend label + corresponding front end copy

✍️ Creating a system of sharing

Some examples of the improved end-to-end collaboration experience:

Guest access

The review sessions feature gave people a way to collaborate without being on the same team. In user testing, we found people really wanted the ability to see at a glance who had what permissions.

What guests see when previewing a survey

Since guests were not already SurveyMonkey customers, they hadn’t already agreed to our Terms of Use. I worked with the legal team to ensure we were covered in allowing them to preview the survey and to make the legal language plain and accessible.

Requesting access to a survey

Previously, people would get a generic error message if they were given a link to a survey they didn’t have access to. We improved that experience by giving them the ability to request access to the survey directly from the product. Then, the survey owner would be able to share the survey directly from the email notification.

🛑 Challenges

Cross-platform collaboration

As the Sharing + Collaboration team, we are a team that works horizontally across the product rather than vertically in one area. This meant we had to collaborate with other teams whose areas we were designing and building for. We had to ensure that what we were designing would fit in that part of the product and make sense to users there.

This was a challenge because sometimes teams wanted to use space for something else or were using terms in the sharing features in a different way. For example, another team was working on a Preview page (noun) and we were using ‘preview’ as a verb. We also wanted to use this new preview page in one of our key collaboration features. We needed to make sure customers would understand what to expect when navigating to a survey preview or when trying to share a preview with someone on their team.

This required lots of close knit collaboration and alignment on terminology and timelines for launch.

💥 The Impact

Now, customers who use collaboration features are sending more surveys and upgrading their accounts. We also saw a 20%+ increase in retention rate of existing customers who used collaboration features.