HubSpot Customer Journeys

A new reporting experience to track customer activities across digital spaces.

Overview

A customer journey is a visual representation of all the touch points a customer made with a brand or organization. By visualizing the full customer journey, marketing and sales teams can see where their customers are engaging and where they are dropping off – answering the ultimate marketing question: what’s working and what isn’t?

My roles

For this project I was the lead designer and assumed the roles of:

User Researcher 

Design Strategist 

UX Designer

Interaction Designer

Deliverables

  • Competitive research (Woopra, Pendo, Pointilist, Adobe, ChurnZero, Totango) 

  • Use cases and personas

  • Vision and roadmap (alpha, private beta, public beta)

  • Wireframes and low fidelity prototypes

  • User testing and customer interviews

  • High fidelity prototypes

  • Future vision

Project specifications

Duration: 1 year

Tools used:

  • Figma

  • InVision

  • Survey Monkey

  • LiveCharts

  • Trello

Opportunity

A customer journey is a multi-branch graph that show users’ paths to success, as well as drop off. To remain competitive in the MarTech space and fill gaps in Reporting, how can HubSpot leverage its users’ marketing data to provide customer journey insights?

Problem

Marketing reporting is spread across HubSpot, forcing marketers to piece insights together from different places. There is no one report with a holistic, multi-channel overview of how customers are engaging with an organization.

Proposed solution

Filling the gaps in funnel reporting and creating a new report type that can visualize all interactions a customer took during their buying journey up to specific goal, such as become a lead or customer.

Research

I kicked off this project with foundational research, which included competitive analysis to better understand the UX and feature sets of existing customer journey software. User surveys helped me identify what users are hoping to learn from these reports. Lastly, one-on-one interviews provided qualitative and emotional insight into key use cases and the actions users will take from using these reports.

Findings

  1. Unlike sales teams, organizations have a hard time quantifying marketing efforts.

  2. Marketers are understaffed with varying levels of reporting experience. They don’t have time to create reports or learn new software.

  3. Customers would like to use customer journeys to track where leads come from, understand users’ behavior, and track growth, retention, and churn.

  4. Marketers want to use customer journeys to to see what’s working and what isn’t to ultimately make strategy and budgeting decisions.

Deepening user empathy

From research findings, I created several use cases to understand why the need for customer journeys exists and where HubSpot’s current offerings fall short. Our users are creating complex, multi-path, and multi-channel marketing strategies to lead their customers to conversion. Shouldn’t the reporting accurately reflect their work?

Prototyping & alpha

I was able to gather feedback quickly by testing a minimal but working prototype with users’ real data. Users were able to generate a simple bar chart journey of just 5 touchpoints.

This prototype was shared with 1000 users. During this stage, I collected continuous feedback from an in-app survey, as well as made follow-up calls for a more in-depth understanding.

I was able to uncover what users needed from a first iteration and planned how to prioritize features for our private and public betas.

Making this product a success requires hitting the right balance between a feature-rich report and an easy to understand interface. 

Marketing users want customizations that allow them to tweak reports that accurately reflect their unique organization, but they admittedly lack the time to learn complex tools.

Private beta

The private beta focused on data availability and report building. All marketing data from HubSpot was available for graphing. Filters for date range and contact lists allowed users to narrow down insights by specific customer segments and time frames.

For flexibility and to allow branching, steps could be made “optional.”   

To expedite takeaways and ease comprehension, metrics and analytics were available in a table, on the chart in hover, and at page level.

Public beta

For the public beta release, the app was built out even more.

  1. Full events list

  2. Filterable by contact list and date range

  3. Up to 10 steps for graph

  4. Filters on each step

  5. Draggable steps to list and graph

  6. Out-of-the-box metics

  7. Deeper insights on hover

Future of customer journeys

I wrapped up my time at HubSpot during the public beta, but here are some lessons learned and features I think would add a lot of user value:

  • Users were very excited about this tool and looked forward to its’ development but felt the current version was too effortful.

  • Users would love to see journeys automatically generated from campaigns, single marketing channels, or templates.

  • Users wanted more help and guidance from the start, though this need could be reduced by by more automation.

  • Flexibility for steps and multi-steps to create more branching.

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