- Browser Extension Revamp
- Browser Extension Revamp
Making lemonade from lemons: how we turned the ship around, after a rough release.
Background
Jungle Scout provides Amazon sellers with data insights and assists with store management. Its product offering consists of the web-app and the browser extension.
The browser extension helps users conduct product-market research. With over 40K daily active events - it has the highest usage in the product offering.
The project took a month to handoff. This included discovering the problem, understanding the ‘Why’, defining the scope (and goals), and designing the solution. I worked with my team’s PM and Tech Lead - and collaborated with CX, and CS. The primary stakeholders were the Group PM, Design Manager, and Director of Marketing.
Challenge
The browser extension had a churn rate of 51% per month.
We could not identify a specific reason for the high churn rate, but it was clear that users did not find enough value in the current experience.
Goal
Our qualitative goal was to increase value by helping users with a better product research experience.
Our quantitative goal was to increase user interaction on the extension.
What I did
Studied churn data to analyze trends. Interviewed customers to determine pain points and identify low-hanging fruit.
Facilitated brainstorming workshops, aligned stakeholders, and leadership teams throughout the project.
Designed solutions that increased the value of the browser extension experience.
Headed end-to-end design delivery - this included wireframing, testing, iterating, and design handoff.
Supported the customer support and engineering teams during a difficult post-release period.
Let’s break it down.
How I identified the problems
I collaborated with customer success and support to study extension churn data from 2,040 entries.
Reached out and interviewed users who churned to further investigate the ‘why’.
Ran a force ranking test to review the current information architecture.
Researched competitor offerings by running preference tests
Conducted a heuristic usability analysis of the entire browser extension. I leveraged NN/g’s usability principles to spot issues and rated them from a scale of Moderate to Unusable.
Research outcomes
I conducted six interviews with sellers. From these interviews, we learned:
Users were using the extension in isolation, without using it in conjunction with the web-app. This prevented them from fully experiencing Jungle Scout's product research potential.
4 out of 6 users were not aware of the web-app’s existence.
Certain actions such as ‘Filters’ and ‘Add to Product Tracker’ were hidden.
Basic actions like multi-select, bulk actions and table customizations were missing.
The force ranking tests revealed that the labels on the embedded cards were not arranged in order of hierarchical importance.
According to the preference tests, Jungle Scout's current extension performed poorly. Many participants found the layout cluttered and the content difficult to understand.
I used the data gathered from the research to align the stakeholders and convince the leadership team.
Analyzing trends in churn data that show the extension is difficult to use
Facilitating brainstorming sessions to identify Must Have, Good to Have, and Could Have
Result from force ranking show that No. of Monthly and Daily sales should come first
Creating a problem statement to empathize with the user
Execution and iteration
To address the outcomes identified in the research phase, I developed concepts that achieve the following:
Increased the discoverability of the web-app by enabling users to sync their Jungle Scout and Amazon accounts from the extension.
Refined the information hierarchy and added call-to-action elements to address usability concerns.
An easier way to scan Amazon search and listing pages.
I iterated and validated our solutions through external and internal usability testing and designed rules for representing data visualization.
Heat-map usability testing to validate solutions and designing rules for data visualization
Solutions I designed
To address our project goals, I designed the following:
A central account dropdown where:
Users can also connect their Amazon and Jungle Scout accounts.
See an overview of their business operations. Users can also access the detailed dashboard by clicking on a link
Redesigned embed cards now:
Allows users to customize the label hierarchy based on their needs.
Call attention to actions such as ‘Track Product’, which direct users to fine-tune their product research in the web-app.
Introduced a slider component to initiate an increase in user scans of Amazon pages.
New central account dropdown that now allows Amazon and Jungle accounts to be synced
Redesigned search page embed cards
Redesigned product page embed cards that now call attention to 'Track Product' button
New slider component that launches scan pop-up modal
Results and learnings
The launch of the updated version of the extension had a rocky start, here’s why:
Pushed version 7.0.0 out to all 450K users at once.
Learning: Release the new version gradually, starting with a few users and then scaling up.
The latest version was not stress tested sufficiently. We received over 100+ bug and issue tickets on the first day.
Learning: Prioritize hiring a QA team! Most of our users use Windows laptops. We did not have a Windows machine to test the extension. Also, expect things to break once released - be prepared to troubleshoot.
We did not notify our users of any upcoming changes. They woke up one fine day to a whole new experience!
Learning: Users can be resistant to change, sometimes favouring familiar but less usable products. If change is necessary, it should be introduced subtly and incrementally.
Turning those lemons into lemonade!
How we fixed the mess!
Right off the bat - I integrated myself with customer support teams. I worked overtime and over the weekends fielding complaints and tickets.
My PM and I tracked incoming tickets, and I personally reached out to the most disgruntled users, assuring them of the upcoming fixes to the extension.
I reached out to and interviewed 9 users in a span of one week. This experience got me incredibly close to our customers, heightening my understanding of the user and how they interact with the browser extension.
In a span of one month, we released seven updates tackling 100+ tickets. Our team was nicknamed ‘the agile machine’.
Success metrics
Even though we had a rocky release, we had some big wins.
Products added to track (on web-app) from extension have increased by 17%.
The use of filters has increased by 9%.
More than 30K daily clicks on the slider component to trigger page scan pop-up.
Currently, 8% of all Amazon and Jungle Scout account syncs happen directly from the extension. The solution introduced a new channel for acquiring account syncs for the business.
Monthly Churn reduced to 47%
