Challenge
Uncovering admin pain points
Over the years HubSpot focused on the end-user experience — those doing the work in the product daily. As companies grew and users were added, some existing users were being tapped to be the unofficial HubSpot admin. We needed to understand the admin space quickly to learn more and define:
- Who are our admins — do they have a marketing, sales, or service background?
- What are the core admin tasks (jobs to be done)?
- What should our top priorities be in this space?
- What are the gaps and opportunities in the admin space?
- What are the top pain points for admins?
Process
Troubleshooting troubles:
a competitive analysis
A competitive analysis revealed that while HubSpot excels in many admin features, troubleshooting user issues presented a potential gap compared to some competitors. Recognizing the importance of a frustration-free user experience, I developed guidelines to help our team make decisions that prioritize simplifying problem-solving for users encountering issues. This approach aims to differentiate HubSpot by offering a superior user experience even when users face challenges.
Governance design principles to help guide decision-making
Digging deeper and building with our customers
Our top priority was to address user impersonation, a feature that customers had been requesting for years. This feature allows admins to act as users to help with setup and troubleshooting. My product manager and I conducted a study to understand the challenges admins face and their expectations for user impersonation.
Research goals
- Identify admin pain points related to impersonation
- Understand current admin troubleshooting methods.
- Evaluate if impersonation is the best solution.
If we were able to emulate a user, we won’t have to ask support all the time. This is a hurdle to us getting more HubSpot products. We are a bit shell shocked from some past instances.
Sarah Cocos
Marketing Manager, Velux
What did we learn?
Admins face challenges when troubleshooting user accounts due to user-related factors like customization, tech skills, and understanding of CRM terms. Additionally, misalignment between admins and users, time constraints, and scalability issues with increasing numbers of users contribute to the difficulties.
Based on our learning, I assembled a typical troubleshooting journey for users and admins. This helped my team and other stakeholders see all the steps involved and why fixing issues is so hard.
Our customers' troubleshooting process often involved multiple back-and-forth interactions between users and admins, which could be time-consuming and frustrating. This sometimes limited the user's experience or even hindered product adoption.
Solution
Log in as a user
Recognizing HubSpot's potential, I defined the problem, articulated opportunities and risks, and outlined the optimal implementation based on customer research. By mapping the ideal admin journey, we streamlined the experience while maintaining a strong focus on technical and security requirements to safeguard our customers' user accounts.
Once notified of a user's problem, Admins could quickly login to a user's account to fix problems, instead of going back and forth.
By utilizing the existing design system patterns, I was able to rapidly develop design options that maintained a simple and intuitive user experience. In the end, we decided the contextual alert pattern was the best pattern for the user and the simplest implementation.
Following a thorough design critique and incorporating valuable team feedback, we implemented our proposed solution. This approach not only adhered to our existing design system patterns, ensuring a consistent and familiar user experience, but also prioritized the necessary security measures to safeguard user accounts. During the critique, a suggestion was made to introduce additional friction into the flow. To enhance security, we implemented a confirmation modal, prompting users to verify their intended action and its potential consequences before proceeding with impersonation.
