How I focused on more meaningful work

STAT is Moz’s enterprise-level SEO analytics platform (B2B SaaS). It provides high-volume keyword tracking, trend monitoring, and competitive insights for professional SEO practitioners and data-driven marketing teams at mid-to-large organizations.

It’s a powerful tool, but looked like it was designed for Windows 95 and it hadn’t been updated in over a decade.

I was hired to redesign it.

I conducted Discovery Sessions with all department heads and anyone else who heard the outdated UI was costing STAT clients. I wanted to know what they thought needed to be fixed in STAT, and why.

I also needed to know what users were saying exactly, who was saying it, and where I can see that evidence for myself.
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What I learned:
Turns out a lot of the feedback was from the same few clients, many of whom already churned.

Client feedback was also mixed with a lot of specific feature requests that CS and Sales felt were more pressing to address than the UI.

Since no one had any concrete data to justify dropping everything for a full redesign, we needed some.

I gathered everyone again and conducted a User Research Question Brainstorming Session (popularly known as an URQBS).

We brainstormed every question we needed answered to make this decision confidently, and how we could get those answers efficiently.

What I learned:
A lot of the answers could be found in various systems, but it was clear we were going to have to speak directly with our users.

In order to efficiently get as much relevant feedback as possible, I conducted a Product Market Fit (PMF) survey. Using the new Superhuman framework, I sent the PMF survey to all of our clients.

What I learned:
‍Turns out there was a list of other things our clients wanted before an updated UI/UX.

Leadership could not believe that UI/UX was so low on the list and wanted me to talk with more clients, especially those that were frustrated with our current design.

Over the course of 2 months, I conducted research interviews with over 40 clients (while also working on immediate projects).

What I learned:
Improving the UI/UX wasn’t even in the top 10 from this research study. It seemed our clients were familiar with our product and could use it just fine. What they really wanted were more impactful features to help them with their SEO tasks.

I combined all feature requests and frustrations from the PMF survey and the interviews, and “Improving the UI/UX” moved further down in importance.

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I got together with the stakeholders and we brainstormed solutions to the top frustrations (some of which were already in play), and came up with a list of improvements.

Working with Product and Dev, we went through our impact/effort process on the list of improvements. This gave us a rough estimate of how much it would cost to build each feature.

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Working with BI and using the data from the PMF Survey and interviews, we were able to get a rough estimate on how each feature would improve our churn rate (I can walk through this process in person).

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This allowed us to calculate a rough ROI for each feature and solidified an 18 month roadmap of more impactful changes for our clients (and business).

End of the day, we had a long list of feature requests directly from our users, sorted by ROI.

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We actually ended up postponing the improvements to the UI/UX for 7 years, until finally, the feedback suggested it was time to fix it.

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‍You can read all about that project here.