Case Study: Method & Metric

External Challenges.

The start of this project was around the same time Covid-19 took shape and most businesses and institutions went remote. This shift made for a different experience and forced us to adjust on the fly. We had to implement new communication channels and figure out how to cope with this new reality.

The Team.

For this project, we focused exclusively on the UX side of things while placing special importance on delivering a research package as a deliverable. Because of this, my team consisted of 2 other UX Designers — Ben and Angel. It was a pleasure to work with both of them as they each had their own strengths in the project which helped my development as a designer. Afterthe first week, we really jelled as a team despite the circumstances and I looked forward to our daily morning huddles. I can’t wait to have coffee with them after the social distancing rule is lifted!

RESEARCH

Domain & Organizational Research.

Despite coming from a Digital Marketing background, I had to spend some time doing a crash course into SEO. It has been a few years since I’ve worked on anything SEO or Content Marketing related so this was a good refresher in to the basics. This allowed me to keep up with the jargon in the interviews and ask smarter questions through-out the research stage.
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The first thing we noticed was how competitive the SEO software and tool market appeared to be. To confirm this assumption I used Google Ads Keyword Planner to gauge the competitiveness of the industry. Keyword Planner details the average monthly search volume for select keywords as well as how expensive it is to bid on these keywords within Google. The marketer in me wanted to build something that would have the potential to succeed. The only way to succeed in competitive industries is to have a true unique selling proposition. This methodology helped us have better conversations around the MVPs later in the project.

Here’s what I found in the Keyword Planner:

- Although the ‘Competition’ index is stating low to medium in the report below, average monthly searches for top-level keywords still ranged from 480–8,100 searches across Canada and the USA.
- Keyword research was the highest volume SEO feature.
- There were a ton of searches for beginner SEO material.

Beyond Google Ads Keyword Planner, our domain research also showed that there were at least 7 direct competitors in the space and a handful of indirect competitors. We picked a few of the most relevant competitors and tested out the tools comparing specific features with that of the current Method & Metric tool.

From there, our team and I worked on our competitive analysis to identify where this tool could fit into the market and how we could create unique value in the industry.

Competitive Analysis.

The process to construct the competitive analysis template began by testing out several similar tools in the market. This allowed us to spot feature overlap and rank each tool accordingly. The document below was consistently updated as we went through the research phase and began to learn about important features for our potential users.

It became clear that there could be an opportunity in the market for an easier to use and simplified SEO tool. The enterprise tools were already cemented in the market and it would be difficult to compete with the complexity and development resources required to build a competing tool. This combined with other research indicated that a lower-cost and simplified tool would be of higher value to many SEO or Content Marketing professionals.
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With some insight into the industry, we moved into crafting our survey.

Survey.

After our initial domain research was complete we deployed a survey to understand the current state of SEO tools and where potential improvements could be made. Although we received fewer responses than we would have liked, it still provided us with some good insights.

Here are some of the best quotes we received when we asked how their current SEO software could be improved:

No-brainer functionality. Using SEMrush still comes with a lot of trial/error for myself as a content marketer with slightly above average SEO knowledge.
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Improved user experience, simplification of data, more streamlined processes, better recommendations for direct actionable insights, more affordable software.
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Analysis or suggestions for why the data is what it is.

Key Survey Insights.

Keyword research was still the most used feature in their tools.
SEO software is too complicated and many users aren’t using it to its full potential.
A lack of an onboarding process hurts the adoption rates of the tools.
70% of respondents used multiple SEO tools.

Interviews.

Interviews were the most comprehensive part of our research with a total of 7 interviews being completed. The SEO experience varied between each interviewee with 4 being seasoned SEO veterans working for global companies while the remaining were starting in the SEO field or had less experience overall.

Interview Quotes.

One of my favourite quotes ever taken from an interview was done in this project. The quote below perfectly summed up a primary pain point:

If you figure out how to tie changes I make back to revenue I will give you my money

If you actually unpack this statement it means a few different things. First showing the value of SEO is difficult. This is critical in situations where you want to request more budget or you need to get buy-in from other departments (i.e. — developers). Secondarily, there doesn’t seem to be an effective and standardized way to measure SEO ROI.

This statement was incredibly insightful for organizations of all sizes looking to show the value of SEO to internal or external stakeholders. This concept also came up several times using different verbiage through-out the other interviews and research methods. Of course, in such a competitive industry the fact that this hasn’t been solved yet indicates that the solution from a technical & design perceptive would be a challenge. We knew that we would have to be creative in our design balancing the scope of the project with what would be technically possible with the resources we had.

There’s so many things going on here that I don’t even know where to look” — Interviewee when talking about the Ahref dashboard

This was another common frustration backed up through several other interviews and survey responses. Most SEO software has a very steep learning curve. This isn’t an issue for experienced SEOs but it can be overwhelming for users who are just starting out or only do a portion of SEO in their job.

Interview Insights.

Difficulties in SEO buy-in including requesting budget. Multiple interviewees also mentioned challenges in showing the value to developers so it could be properly prioritized.
In a lot of cases, we found that SEO was directly compared to Pay-Per-Click (PPC) advertising. For PPC, it is relatively easy to set up a campaign, add a budget, deploy conversion tracking and have a reasonably accurate way to show the performance of the campaigns in regards to revenue or sales qualified leads.
Automation needs to be built into the software. Many SEOs referenced the ability to automate tedious tasks would be a major bonus in a tool. As an example, scheduling site audits or notifying them of issues when they arise.
The learning curve for most SEO software is quite high. The tool would benefit from telling the user what the data is for and how it could be used.
The onboarding experience would be important for users to adopt the tool.
SEO looks very different depending on the company size. The pain-points and needs of someone working in a large organization were quite different when compared to smaller organizations. This is quite true for most positions, however, it seemed almost like different skill sets depending on the size of the organization.

Contextual Inquiry / Task Analysis.

Our final research method was to conduct a remote contextual inquiry/task analysis with our interviewees. After we finished our interview questions we asked the interviewees to conduct several tasks in their current software making sure they talked out loud to describe everything they were seeing and feeling. Most of our task scenarios revolved around features that already existed in the Method & Metric tool, but we did ask them to give us a general overview of their likes and dislikes of their current SEO platform.

Affinity Diagram.

With our interviews complete, our survey closed, and domain research complete we shifted our focus to making sense of everything we learned. Due to the remote nature of this project, we constructed the Affinity Diagram using Whimsical. This was the first time I’ve skipped the traditional Affinity Diagram approach of posting sticky notes on a wall. We jumped directly into digitizing it from the start. Interestingly enough, it seemed to work well when we put a process in place by dividing up the research methods and giving myself the responsibility of sorting, categorizing, and organizing the data.

What we learned from our Affinity Diagrams (looking for patterns!).

Tracking:

The importance of being able to tie SEO campaigns and initiatives back to revenue was a major opportunity.

Automation:

Automatic site crawls to identify issues on webpages.
Simplify the keyword research analysis.
Automatic notifications for site issues.
Opportunities & recommendations where the tool tells the user how to take the data and turn it into actionable insights.

Onboarding & Learning:

Barriers existed for less experienced users especially when it came to learning and navigating the tool.
Tips & content would be helpful guides.
Ability to connect with an expert when the user got stuck.

Essential Reports:

Keyword discovery and analysis.
Competitor Analysis.
Backlinks.
Site Audits.

Persona.

To articulate who we were designing for we formed our persona. Let me introduce you to Brian. Brian is a 35-year-old Entrepreneur based in San Francisco.

Minimum Viable Product (MVP).

It was now time to narrow down which features would be included in the must-haves, nice to have, and not needed. The must-haves would be included in the in prototype whereas the others would be future considerations for the platform.

User Flow.

The task flow below indicates how a first-time user would signup and navigate to the ‘Site Health Audit’ tab to understand his website speed performance.

User Scenario:

Brian recently learned about the Method & Metric dashboard through a peer he met at a Meetup. The meetup he attended focused on website loading speed and its effect on conversion rates and as a ranking signal for Google. Brian decides to signup and access the website speed report in the tool.

Site Map.

With our User Flow in place, we sorted out the site map. This would form the basis for the web application content & report structure.

Paper Prototypes (Low-Fi).

The paper prototypes were the first step in designing our solution. Typically we would test our paper prototypes before moving onto the digitized wireframes. In this case, we were bound by the deadline and weren’t aware of an efficient system to do this remotely. I know there are solutions for paper prototype testing and this will be something I test out in the future.

Instead we each sketched out a few of the core pages and discussed amongst ourselves which ones we would proceed with. Ultimately, we landed on the paper prototypes below.

Mid-Fi Digital Prototypes.

After the discussion with the team, we moved into digitizing our paper prototypes using Sketch.

Usability Testing.

Since we didn’t do much testing in our paper prototype stage we decided that we would prioritize getting feedback on our designs regardless of the deadline. By ‘regardless of the deadline’ I actually mean we would have to work into the night to make the changes so we could meet the deadline :)

Signup Process:

The first usability issue we found was in regards to the signup flow. Our feedback was mainly that we needed more descriptive copy to make it clear what actions need to be taken on each step. Additionally, we changed the hierarchy of information after it was seen as confusing.

Account Creation:

The account creation process required some fine-tuning mostly in the way of a reduction of unnecessary fields. This made the account creation a much more streamlined process.

Onboarding Revisions:

Our onboarding experience had a few visual misalignments that were an easy fix. We also added an ‘out’ if the user did not want to complete the onboarding process. We decided that we would add a ‘Skip Onboarding’ button but let the user know that they could still access the onboarding using the question mark icon in the dashboard.

Future Considerations.

Direct SEO revenue tracking:

To clarify this feature would be a direct connection to SEO campaigns, initiatives, and changes with the ability to tie them back to revenue or sales qualified leads.

I know what you’re thinking. I mentioned this feature through-out this case study, but didn’t include it in the final design? As a first step, we included a Google Analytics revenue pull from the integration. This is a low level and less accurate form of SEO tracking. What really happened was that we simply ran out of time and I didn’t want to showcase something that was only a quarter complete. This feature in itself could have taken 3 weeks to explore and I didn’t have enough data or knowledge about how it would actually work to include it in the final design. Still, it was something I mentioned to the client in our presentation and follow up meeting.

Case Study Logs:

This is a secondary feature that would piggie back on the SEO revenue tracking feature. What I envision here is that it would save a ‘case study’ for each campaign or initiative you did in your SEO environment. This way you could reference the value it brought to the organization and it would be easier to get buy-in from managers and developers.

LiveChat or Support:

A theme we saw in our research was some users wished there was an easy way to get support preferably inside the application. We didn’t include this in our MVP as we felt it would be a big strain on the company at the start. Something to definitely consider in the future though.

Different Dashboards for Different Goals:

Since there was the possibility that multiple users would want to access the dashboard in the same organization, we would have liked to incorporate a user permission structure. This would allow multiple users to login from the same organization. It would also provide each user with a different dashboard if needed.

Conclusion.

This was the first project I have done where it was completely remote. It was very challenging at times and I do miss that face-to-face communication, however, we found ways to simulate the next best thing using video conferencing. All-in-all it was a great project that made me a better designer in the end.

Special thanks to my amazing team. For a couple of designers that never really knew much about SEO to jump into a project like this was remarkable.