I was a product design intern at Pendo - a rapidly-growing startup offering a suite of tools that help businesses understand what drives their success.
One of Pendo's key products is Guides, which businesses can deploy to fulfill a number of purposes - onboarding new users, announcing new features, and communicating important updates to their product.
During my internship...
Repeat Guide Display (RGD) is a new feature that allows Pendo customers to set a guide to repeat a certain number of times and expire after someone dismisses it a certain number of times.
This feature was created as part of a broader initiative to give guide administrators more control over how their guides activate. By allowing a guide to display based on customer behavior, administrators can worry less about their customers being "spammed" with unnecessary guides, and have a better understanding of what guides work best for their business.
When a user wants to see how one of their guides is working, they can access the Guide Details page, which functions like a dashboard.
The Activation card, located at the bottom left of the dashboard, provides a quick overview of how a guide activates.
When I joined the team, there was no way to tell if RGD was activated in this card. The excitement of Repeat Guide Display was hampered by these issues, leading to me looking into ways to incorporate this important information into a redesigned Activation card.
Customer use of Repeat Guide Display after viewing the new card increased by 125%.
After completing my first project, I wanted to dive deeper into the need for efficient guide management demonstrated by Pendo's customers. Research uncovered concerns from customers about overwhelming their users with guides, prompting some to limit their active guides.
Recognizing this, my team proposed adding categories to guides to give customers more control and smarter guide management. Each category would have predefined rules to add guardrails for what goes in a particular guide.
When creating guides, customers are able to save the visual and stylistic elements as a layout. With a layout, it takes far less time to create a new guide - customers can select the layout to streamline the addition of new guides. However, some issues emerged.
With all those limitations, there was no way for customers to properly organize or manage their layouts, extremely limiting the feature's usability. We decided that adding the ability to categorize layouts would be a foundational step in improving this feature and broadening the capabilities of guide categorization.
The final design combines the simplicity of the checkboxes in the first option with the added visibility of the “tags” in the second option.
When the user selects a category…
These simultaneous actions allows for clear visibility of what customers have and have not selected, and preserves all the information they need.
I also addressed the appearance of the closed dropdown. When numerous categories are selected, and their names can't fully display, I introduced a numerical truncation system. It displays what fits within the field and indicates the count of additional selected categories.
Feel free to check out the rest of my portfolio.