User Profile
Allowing users to customize the application to meet their needs.
Table of Contents
Background
Goal
Allow users to customize the application to meet their needs.
Overview
The application evolved “organically” out of what was originally a Compliance Data application. In the original application, the setup focused on the customer. Users were entered and managed by the Customer Success Team (CST). All the users were created with the same default settings.
As users started using the application, we noticed a workflow taking shape. We added compliance management modules and workflow capabilities. Each module catered to a different persona. Each persona expected different behaviors and required slightly different configurations. The original method of setting up and managing users was no longer sustainable for CSTeam or satisfactory for our users.
Concept
Every user-facing application has settings that may impact the user experience (e.x. login credentials, push notifications, topic preferences). The user profile provides an interface that allows users to control such settings and determine how the system should behave to meet their needs. When the users have more control over their choices, their sense of autonomy increases while customer-support costs decrease.
Research & Analysis
Priority Drivers
The initiative for this project came from the head of the Design Team, David Hall, and myself. David had consistently advocated for a user profile area in the application as critical for user adoption and better user experience.
Design Patterns and Heuristics highlight the benefits of user profile settings in business applications. Yet heuristics often struggle to compete for priority with more pressing revenue opportunities. My analysis of the incoming stakeholder input revealed an intersection of Business, Customer Support, and UX/Design objectives. This promoted the priority of the project.
My Role
Product Architect & Product Owner
- Analyze multiple input streams that were brought to the product team’s attention and suggest a high-level application solution
- Present possible approaches and solutions to address the higher level challenge, in this case, Onboarding and Profile Settings
- Come up with a design concept
- Work with the design and product team to expose and define all the components of the solution
- Work with the tech team to understand the feasibility of the project
- “Product own” the implementation
- Work closely with the development team to see the implementation of the solution
Different Users by Jobs
- Compliance Monitor
- Compliance Subject Matter Expert
- Product Compliance Engineer
- Compliance Team Manager
Stakeholder Objectives
Product Team
The profile will capture the user’s role and preferences. Capturing these, and the possible relationships between them will offer the business a more in-depth understanding of user needs, targeted marketing, and business development opportunities.
The new Product Compliance Solution caters to users in a specific role. The profile will support this by capturing this target group of users. This will allow the business to promote the model more effectively.
With Onboarding, the objective was to encourage the users to complete the wizard. Our givens: new users are not very familiar with the system. The better they define their interests, the more value they will get.
To support completion, we promoted a strong message: “the user settings are flexible and changeable; you can refine them as you go”.
The profile was designed as a way to fulfill this promise.
Customer Success Team (CST)
Originally all user setup tasks were performed on the backend by the customer success team. As different persona’s started using the system, requests for more customized settings came in. The team was increasingly burdened with the need to set up, maintain and change many user options, on top of the customer setting.
The CSTeam was experiencing a growing number of requests to customize content at the user level. The application did not provide an easy interface for this task. The increase in requests involved tinkering with backend filters and “back and forth” communications with users.
The CSTeam needed a better, more hands-off way to address this user need.
Because the filters and options were set on the backend, the users had limited visibility into what was driving their content.
The customer success team was too often engaged in answering user questions such as: What can I watch? What am I watching? Why am I seeing this and not that?
These questions could be addressed by exposing the filter options to the users and allowing them to manage them.
User Requests
In direct relation to the CSTeam’s objectives, the users were requesting more visibility into personal and application settings.
The users were asking for more autonomy in exploring content. They wanted the ability to change and fine-tune the content when the task they were working on required it.
Define Solution
The User Profile Pattern
In modern software applications, the user’s profile settings allow for personalization, a new UX standard, expected by users.
The user’s experience of the application, its structure layout, available menus, and features are often derived from the user’s selected settings and preferences.
Profile May Include
A user profile has several roles in the system:
- It contains security-related information that controls how the user signs on to the system, what the user is allowed to do after signing on, and how the user’s actions are audited.
- It contains information that is designed to customize the system and adapt it to the user.
- In business applications, the user’s professional details, such as Email Address, Job Title, and Role allow another user as well as the system, to identify the user.
- It often includes a view of the content settings; what is available, what is currently selected, and what is available to add or remove.
- The ability for the user to control the type and frequency of push notifications.
The Benefits
Business
Product management, marketing, and sales: The profile settings serve as the sources of valuable customer data. The business can use this data for targeted marketing and product research activities.
Users
Users: Users will benefit from optimized setup defaults, personalized product/service recommendations, and targeted push information.
Customer Success Team
Customer Success Team: The visibility and accessibility of the settings will reduce costs. As basic user setup and configurations are more transparent, the Customer Success Team can engage with the users at a higher level of support.
Requirements
Easy to access, easy to see what is available, easy to navigate and change.
Make available those settings that the users are asking for, and that will empower them on their user journey.
The user should be able to easily “get” which settings are available without the need to open each navigation option.
Based on the assumption that the user wants to change the way that the application behaves, group the setting accordingly.
Avoid ambiguity and new terms. To promote recall, use terminology that was already introduced to the user during onboarding, and in the application.
Provide immediate feedback on a change. Where relevant, inform the user of what to expect from the change, and where to look for it.
As promised, allow the user to change all the defaults that were set during the user onboarding experience.
In the profile, make all the content areas available for selection and show the users the content areas already selected.
Where possible, reuse the same interfaces that were introduced in the User Onboarding Wizard.
User Needs
- Make it easy for users to manage their preferences.
- Align the settings with the user's needs.
- Make the available settings easy to view or derive.
- When there are many settings, group them by system behaviors.
03, 04 User needs to behaviors
01, 02 Behaviors to interface
Design Heuristics
- Use consistent terminology.
- Provide meaningful feedback on changes.
When a user changes role in the application, this could very likely change the user’s email preferences, filtering needs, and choice of the landing page. The application should detect the change and, when relevant, offer helpful suggestions.
Profile Settings to Match “Onboarding”
- Make available all the default settings made during Onboarding.
- Make sure that the user can change all the options set during the Onboarding journey, as promised.
An application-specific requirement for this profile was that it would be able to accommodate all the selections made during Onboarding – those made explicitly by the user and those made by default – following the user selection (see User Onboarding project)
Followups and Next Steps
Followup Data
Next Steps
- Notify the Customer Success Team of changes to the user's setting (first 6mo)
- Implement the Simple Feedback Widget for feedback on new sections
- Implement visualizations for easy tracking of the more straightforward KPIs
- Consider a user survey
