SQUARESPACE TEMPLATE STORE
Sitting within the Growth org, the Conversion team at Squarespace works to ensure customers can easily get to a starting point that works best for them and provide a smooth handoff to the trial experience.
As a Senior Product Designer, I’m responsible for: planning and leading discovery workshops, leveraging data to create empathetic and elegant solutions and solve complex problems, working closely with product strategy and engineering partners to contribute to OKRs/vision/roadmap, facilitating user research and testing, and ensuring product consistency.
ABOUT
TIMELINEMay 2020-June 2022
ROLESenior Product Designer
CONTRIBUTORSColleen Redmond, Product Design Manager
Anukrati Pachauri, Product Manager
Tom Conroy, Engineering Lead
Jenn Chen, Content Strategist
Alexandria Liu, UX Researcher
The team focuses on the pre-trial customer experience covering the template store which houses linear onboarding, template detail page, and template design. Our goals have always been to enable more users to start a trial with confidence, improve landing to trial conversion rate, and better match users' intent/attributes to template content.
EXPERIENCE GOAL
With the company-wide adoption of Marty Kagan’s Empowered Model, the team adapted and moved fast. We kicked off the year with a week-long discovery sprint that set the blueprint for how our team does discovery, workshops, and testing. Considering how much DIY and A/B testing we were doing, setting up and improving processes was key.
DESIGN PROCESS
Week long discovery sprint.
Interviews with the team and outside led to How Might We’s.
Towards the end of discovery sprint we sketched and presented concepts.
Following discovery, I led a competitive audit async workshop.
Users come to our template store with varying needs associated with creative freedom, content readiness, style, and business journey. Our current template store offers a one-size-fits-all approach by offering only one template version regardless of the above. As part of one of our OKRs, during discovery work, we identified template scope as one of the attributes that could impact users to publish a website.
PAST EXPERIMENT HIGHLIGHTS
LEARNING OBJECTIVE
To collect a light signal if users express interest, and perceive value, in differently sized templates.
ASSUMPTIONS
A template with less content is perceived as being less work
More pages = more time to get your website ready to publish
Page amount & length can overwhelm users from the perspective of how much content they need in order to fill up the page and be ready to publish
WHAT WE TESTED
Three sizes—
Small: seller has business idea but content isn’t developed yet, needs site to act as point of contact
Medium: growing business, seller is starting out
Large: established seller/business
Initial template scope sketches during design sprint.
Template scope research prototype.
RESEARCH FINDINGS
We found that users want different-sized templates and interpret different sizes as different business stages. It created a desire for a “build your own experience” or cherry-picking certain pages to create their own template size. Overall, we validated interest in different sizes of templates. This test really surprised the team, and it served as a north star in understanding users and their business journey needs.
The template preview page brought very little value in convincing users to progress to the next step. Our data suggested that only 50% of users preview a template before starting a trial. We believed presenting more template information on the page could help users better evaluate templates, thus easing their frustration of being overwhelmed by template options.
PAST EXPERIMENT HIGHLIGHTS
Original template detail page.
BACKGROUND
Out of our discovery sprint, we aimed to address the users' needs around understanding the building blocks of templates. The Template Detail Page experiment had us testing a template detail page that added information on style, layout, features, and customer examples.
HYPOTHESIS
If users understand they can change the style, pages, and sections of a template, they will feel less pressure to find and choose the perfect template and commit to starting a trial faster.
Discovery sprint prototype.
Post-discovery template detail page for A/B test.
