WHAT'S NEW
Keeping users informed and engaged with announcements
My Role
UX Designer
Tools
Figma
Timeline
2022
Team
Gizem Ünaler (UXR) / Feyza Kerti (PM) / Emre Güllü (BE) / Alper Kocaman (BE) / Salih Emre Boga (FE)
Introduction
Role
As the lead UX designer, I took charge of various responsibilities throughout the project, including conducting in-depth user research, generating concepts, collaborating closely with key stakeholders to establish project goals, designing intuitive user interfaces and interactions, prototyping interactive experiences, conducting comprehensive user testing, iterating designs based on user feedback, and ultimately ensuring the delivery of a high-quality final product.
The Goal
As Picus constantly improves its features and content, it's important to keep users informed about the latest updates and improvements to the product. To address this need, we decided to create an announcement feature that would inform and engage customers about new features, improvements, and the new content we're updating so often.
Solution
The solution was designing a product update feature within the application in which users can notify about the newest and most important information about the product divided by categories.
• • •
Discovery
User Interviews
During the interviews, we understood the importance of real-time updates. While we had been communicating new security content via email, we acknowledged that in-app announcements could offer a more integrated and seamless experience. Additionally, our research revealed that users desired readily accessible and categorized updates upon logging into the application, along with the capability to review past updates. We also asked our users which kinds of categories they wanted to see. Based on the answers, we segmented announcments into five distinct categories: new features, improvements, new threats, emerging threats, and integrations.
Insights
01
Announcements within the app to access new content without having to check the email constantly.
02
Quickly find and focus on the announcements that are most relevant to the user needs.
03
Access past announcments to track changes and stay informed about the application's evolution over time.
Proposed Solution
A categorized approach
Based on the user insights, we segmented "What's new announcements" into five distinct categories: new features, improvements, new threats, emerging threats, and integrations in collaboration with the product manager.
Informational and actionable announcements
We recognized that some announcements could include actions that the user could take, while others were purely informational. Accordingly, we decided to categorize the updates, facilitating a design for our announcements that intuitively indicated the user's need for action.
Hybrid communication: In-product and email
We decided to adopt a hybrid communication approach, utilizing in-product announcements and email updates. Email notifications were primarily used for emerging threats to ensure users received timely information for the most significant content.
Design
UX Audit
Once we understood user needs and available resources, I conducted a thorough analysis of eight different products' announcement features. This analysis encompassed aspects such as feature positioning, operational mechanisms, content, and layout, all of which informed our design decisions.
Deliver
Centralized access
Ensuring easy accessibility by positioning the feature within the "Help" area on the top navigation bar and providing users with a centralized location to access important updates. Users can easily find and check for announcements without having to navigate through different sections of the application.
Increased visibility
Placing announcements on the side panel ensures that they are easily accessible and visible to users. Users can quickly glance at the side panel without interrupting their workflow.
Color code
Differentiating announcement categories through color-coded tags for quick identification. Each content piece was meticulously structured, including a tag, date, title, description, and graphic.
Reusable Formats
Maintaining visual uniformity was a challenge when multiple UX team members contributed to the this section. Creating reusable formats for the five announcement categories ensured consistency when adding a new announcement.
Result
Our approach yielded positive results, with a 24% increase in usage of new content and features, and a significant 30% rise in first-time feature usage.
Next Steps
Building upon our first delivery, we plan to introduce additional features such as filtering and search options to ease up finding specific announcements.