Survey In-App MEssages

ROLE
Research and end-to-end design
Mentorship of Design Intern

TEAM
Design Intern, PM, EM, 4 Eng

Introduction

This project was the first large phase of the broader multi-year vision for in-app messages. Prior to this, the team completed a large round of discovery research, built a few essential foundational features, and established technical architecture essential to the success of this project.

The first portion of the project was completed by an intern, with my close involvement and guidance. Once the internship was over, I took over the project and saw it through launch.

The Problem

Customers want to create more sophisticated messages, quickly in Braze (without reliance on Custom HTML).

Process

Prior Research

What we knew:

Opportunities

Opportunities: HOW MIGHT WE

1. (have numbers to relate to opportunities below)

Ideation

• Multiple choice/multi-select
 • Star rating (NPS survey)

• Ranking

• 1 / multi questions, 


• Feedback collection 

• Collecting data like email


User Testing

Final Scoping

Gated Rollout

This feature was rolled out to a small portion of customers (~40) over a few weeks. We completed usability testing and interviews with 6 customers as they built their first survey, with general success.

Once at least 25 customers successfully launched a survey and engineering approved performance and scaling,

Outcomes

For Customers, surveys unlocked new use cases for our customers. In the past, they had to use third party tools or write custom HTML to gather feedback from their users. Typically working with the implicit data of how their customers use the product, customers can now gather explicit data and confidently understand user preferences and needs. And, they can do it quickly. A survey can be launched in a matter of minutes, and customers can do so confidently.

Once customers collect survey data, they can enrich their current Braze strategy, as well as broader product strategy. With information like preferred notification channels, content choices, and product preferences, marketers can better target and personalize their Braze user journeys and messages. We also saw excitement from marketers, researchers, and growth product managers alike, as they can now directly ask customers what to build, from within the product.

This project highlighted the need for more survey flexibility: open-ended text areas, multiple questions/pages, logic-based branching, inclusion of images/icons, and more specific templates like NPS and CSAT. This also sparked conversations around more types of data collection potentially available through IAMs, like email and phone number capture. These needs and ideas were taken on board and used in future roadmaps.

Internally, this project was a massive milestone in a multi-year strategy to transition IAMs from restrictive native SDK code to flexible and sophisticated HTML messages. The first-ever out-of-the-box template using HTML, surveys proved that we can live in a world where IAMs can be fully visually customizable to be on-brand, and new templates can unlocked new use cases for customers. Now that we could create new templates, we needed to add a 🚫🚫drag-and-drop editor🚫🚫 for further message design customization, complete with template library of robust use cases.

Overall, surveys proved to be wildly successful for customers and

Reflections

This project came with many challenges, namely around process and external forces. As previously mentioned, an intern with other smaller projects completed the first portion of the project, so the research moved slower than normal. After the internship, the project had various stops and stalls as more urgent priorities arose and technical considerations increased beyond initial estimates.

Started in 2019, this project spilled over into 2020. A lot of customer interviews were conducted in March and April, during the heigh of the pandemic. This made scheduling challenging, as many marketers were quickly shifting initiatives and reacting to the uncertain and quickly-changing world around us. It was also generally a stressful time, which likely impacted team morale and efficiency.

While the project had a few complications, I am very proud of it. The project received company recognition and we received praise from both our customers, and our friends in customer success and pre-sales. A couple highlights:

Years later, one CSM insisted that Surveys were still their favorite feature ever released.

One customer said this feature could change the way she works, and tee her up for a promotion, now that she can run in-product surveys and work more closely with product teams.