video sending & communication web app
1-to-1 Video Recording & Delivery
My Role
User Research, UX/UI, Interaction, Prototyping
The Team
Julie Baker (PM)
Chris Traynor (Lead SWE)
Virginia Cheng (SWE)
Cameron Luo (SWE)
Jordan Michalski (PD)
Results
38% increase in New Upsell Revenue
27% Monthly Active User Growth
120K+ Videos Created
2.1K Monthly Unique Sessions
+63 Rolling NPS score
The Problem
EverTrue's DXO program moves major donors up the fundraising pyramid using data and outreach. However, the program heavily relied on a third-party video platforms, which was confusing for users since EverTrue already owned their own video application, ThankView. This, coupled with the cost of maintaining said third party vendor, made finding a solution in-house a must.
Timeline
From initial research to release, the project took around 6 months.
Background
ThankView is a cloud-based platform that helps non-profits, universities, and other institutions enable outreach to donors through designing, recording, sending, and tracking personalized videos. The platform also enables users to design personalized landing pages with custom logos, colors and images to establish brand identity.
Understanding the current state
ThankView allowed organizations to develop video campaigns and send them out to donors on a set cadence. However, the average campaign required anywhere from 26-106 clicks to complete… that's too many!
There had to be a simpler way we could empower our user base to create videos without the overhead of campaign creation. An experience where an individual could record, edit, and send videos all from a single screen.
Research
Finding the problem in the picture
ThankView is used by a large number of personas in the industry, so we had to begin by choosing a smaller section of that user base to do research with in order to maintain deadlines. We chose to focus on Donor Experience Officers first as they were the ones who would be moved off of the third party platform the soonest.
Observations from interviews:
We conducted 8 research calls with 20 core users over the course of 3 weeks.
*Additional usage data acquired through Mixpanel dashboard.
25
videos created per week by each Donor Experience Officer in the program
76
the average number of clicks it took to finish a single campaign send from our video platform
82%
of users were creating and sending videos every single day from the third party platform
95%
believed that the third part platform was user-friendly and helped with their day-to-day job functions
Major Pain Points
The third-party application was unintuitive and not very user friendly for non-profit use cases.
Constant reporting and data syncing challenges due to videos living in multiple systems.
Keeping contracts with third-party apps in the program was detrimental to business revenue goals.
We compiled the data and charted our findings, eventually deciding as a team to pursue a 1-to-1 video solution where a user would be able to record, edit, and send a video through email in one single experience.
Ideation
Creating videos with no overhead
I started exploring options through lo-fi iterations, eventually settling on an experience where the user could pre save video spots and record a bunch all at once as it was common for DXOs to record 10-15 videos a week, and many wanted to knock them all out in one sitting.
User Testing
How will our users respond to the changes
From those first iterations, I then built a working prototype in Maze and re-interviewed some of our initial users, letting them run through the design and offer feedback before it was built. That feedback can be directly seen in the final designs!
final designs
Recording video has never been faster
handoff
Delivering for development
While we don't do traditional handoffs at EverTrue, I did prepare my document and the associated resources in a way that would allow our engineers to quickly and easily find what they needed without having to sift through all of the past iterations.
Results
How did our users react to the change?
The feedback we received was immediate, with 100% of organizations using the third-party software switching within a week.
Now, only two quarters since the full release, we have seen a significant increase in both monthly active users and new upsell revenue while also maintaining our excellent NPS scores.
Results
38% increase in New Upsell Revenue
27% Monthly Active User Growth
120K+ Videos Created
2.1K Monthly Unique Sessions
+63 Rolling NPS score
This project was a really interesting and challenging one as the amount of user data and research we had to accomplish was immense. I really enjoyed that aspect, and hope to bring more research-focused workshops into future design sprints. Grappling with a strict deadline and a need to sunset a contract with new features also presented interesting challenges, mainly in that we were working on design while engineers worked on implementation simultaneously. However, the team did a great job and open lanes of communication became a crucial factor in our success.