Project

As a content designer at Zapier, I sat with the UX researchers in a larger function called UX+. This name reflects our greater purpose—because we're considered a shared product service and work with multiple product teams, we have the benefit of being able to see the bigger picture and champion for the holistic, end-to-end user experience.

After working with several different product teams in my first four months at Zapier, I started to notice that the silos of each team's work had led to multiple content and conceptual gaps throughout the user journey, creating an inconsistent and challenging user experience. I decided to explore this further by creating a content map of the full user journey, from their initial awareness of Zapier to the management and analysis of their Zaps.

Strategy

My first step was to gather and inventory all the pages and content users would encounter throughout their user journey in Zapier, which resulted in six distinct stages.

I then took the following steps for each stage to create the content map:

1. 1. Identify the concepts raised
   2. Identify the job stories and goals/tasks
   3. Determine the information users need
   4. Determine the learning objectives
   5. Identify how the user's mental model is shaped

[ View full content map (PDF) ]

After mapping this information, it was easy to identify the content gaps by looking at the discrepancies between what users needed and what they actually experienced.

Next, I performed a gap analysis by looking at the theme(s) of each gap, the problem(s) the gap resulted in, and what next steps were needed. I also referenced relevant user research studies and support ticket data that provided additional context or supporting evidence.

A couple of the gap analyses are shown below:

A few gaps had relatively straightforward solutions, such as adding key definitions in tooltips on the Zap usage page. However, most of the gaps were extensive in scope and required a deep dive with further research and cross-collaboration with multiple teams.

One of the first gaps I decided to tackle was tasks. Whenever a Zap successfully completes an action, it counts as one task. For example, if a Zap sends five emails, it automates and counts as five tasks. Each pricing plan has different task limits, with the top two plans offering additional metered task billing.

Although tasks are an essential part of Zapier's pricing model, they weren't introduced or defined until a user had already set up their first Zap and actively went to their Task History—and even there, the word "task" only appeared but wasn't actually defined.

In addition, the word "task" was also used to refer to a single run of a Zap, and many Zap runs might not result in any tasks being automated at all, leading to further confusion.

In a nutshell, a user's knowledge level of tasks in the new user journey looked like this:

I combed through the UX insights database for relevant user feedback from support tickets, and canvassed the support team for their perspectives from working with users.

This helped to validate the three major causes of user confusion with tasks, and dig deeper into why we should care about closing this gap—when pricing elements are unclear, users feel nickel-and-dimed, find it difficult to find a suitable plan, and lose their trust in Zapier.

This resulted in three desired outcomes of closing this gap:

The solution here was to treat tasks as an essential concept in the user journey. I explored a few possible steps we should take, such as introducing and defining what a task is on the homepage and during the onboarding flow.

Another idea was to display task usage in the Zap editor, so users would know the number of tasks their Zap would use each time it ran before turning it on

Lastly, I recommended that we should clearly differentiate the concept of a "task" compared to a "Zap run"—both were crucial but distinct concepts in understanding how Zaps worked. We also needed to rename "Task History", as Zap activity did not necessarily result in any tasks being automated and used.

Outcome

After working on the content map, gap analysis, and deep dives of a few content gaps, I established a cross-functional working group consisting of 12 people across product, design, UX research, marketing, learning and development, and support.

For 6 months, the working group met on a bi-weekly basis to discuss existing gaps and ongoing content issues that span multiple stages of the user journey and teams.

The cross-functional nature of the group allowed us to get collective buy-in and flesh out and test ideas quickly. For example, I was able to work with the designer on the Editor team to come up with an initial design for a task usage count in the Zap editor days I presented the analysis of the task gap.

This design quickly got feedback from team members, including onboarding support specialists who frequently encountered this issue while dealing with new Zapier users.

This design was then tested and iterated with several rounds of usability testing, released to a small percentage of users in an A/B test, and finally rolled out to all users.

I also worked concurrently with the designer and PM on the Manage & Monitor team to change "Task History" to "Zap History", and introduce the concept of a "Zap run". The former "Task Log" section was also changed to a "Zap runs" section with a separate task counter, which achieved the following objectives:

These collaborative product updates led to support tickets around task confusion in billing and history decreasing by more than 65%, as well as initiated a project to refresh content in the Zap editor to remove jargon and confusing language.