💡 The Guided Product Finder is a quiz designed to assist prospects in identifying the products that meet their needs eliminating friction and confusion regarding product offerings.
Objectives
Promote awareness of ecobee's products for both, energy and security features
Personalize consideration experience (top of conversion funnel) for visitors of ecobee.com and recommending best price and feature integration
Increase conversion
Impact
Contributes to 5% of the channel's orders
Users who take the wizard convert at 200 bps higher than baseline
Guiding Principles
Ease of use
Equal promotion of energy and security products
Personalized to the user needs and maximizing their savings
Highlight our sustainability mission by educating visitors how our products unlock energy and security benefits
The process
It all started in July 2022 during a team hackathon. An engineer and I partnered up to develop a quiz that would lead to a personalized recommendation of ecobee products. We both had experienced first hand how confusing it can be to understand the different offerings and we appreciate when websites can include this help, not to mention its fun to take short quizzes! I will owe you images from this version but just imagine:
We only had a day and a half to work on this
We did not have the opportunity to involve stakeholders from other teams to ensure the recommendations were logical
I came up with a scoring system that now, looking back, makes no sense whatsoever
It did, however, provide with the basic coding structure that would be leveraged later
SimpliSafe “Build-my-system” is one of the competitors researched. The team agreed that our feature should not simply be a page with multiple add to cart options. This is the link to it if you’d like to try it out.
There was then another team hackathon in 2023 where I partnered with our director and an engineer and we conducted competitor research in the smart security line of business. One of the findings was that most competitors offered some form of guided assistance, though only one was remotely helpful! This finding was key to formalize the work of ecobee’s product finder with me leading as a product manager.
To kickstart the discovery process, the following was researched and documented:
Business objectives and hypothesis of how this project would remove friction for our web visitors
Quantitative data regarding the journey (page views) of a visitor prior to arriving at payment page and comparing it by type of product, as well as the total count of FAQs visited by category
Analysis of relevant qualitative data from prior research conducted for other web projects
Competitor research and comparison with other industries
Once this discovery report was shared with the e-commerce leadership team and got approval to include in roadmap and assigned the prioritization level, I started collaborating with design, engineering and copywriting team members to design a feature that would recommend a highly personalized result while keeping the quiz short and oriented to the needs of our visitors, removing the friction and frustration of researching options. Some of the tasks involved as a product manager:
Identified minimum requirements, discuss with core team and refining with each block of work completed. The goal of the first release is to validate the use case of this feature but, in order to do that, the original version has to provide a delightful experience for the visitor so as to set ourselves up for success, while limiting the scope to the must have functionality. The scoping was done for design, copywriting, development and a work back schedule was created
Due to the lack of quality data, we were not able to leverage machine learning for the personalization so it need to be done manually but the team’s working framework left it unclear on who should own this portion of the project. Whether it was the PM role to do this or not, I took it up given my familiarity wih the products and network within the product organization. 😮 The total number of feasible recommendations was over a thousand!
Using the RACI framework, I consulted with subject matter experts from other teams across the organization to validate quiz design and product recommendations. This required to create a figjam diagram for stakeholders to easily visualize the possible combinations and recommendations, where each recommendation had a consistent design that used colour coding selections to make it easily comparable - except, now I learned that colour coding alone does not meet accessibility criteria 💡
Collaborated with UX research team to conduct usability testing to validate the designs and collect qualitative information on the participants experience via an unmoderated usability test
Created a diagram for all the possible selection combinations which was the best format required by engineering lead to understand how to develop the code for this feature
Given the resource constraints for content management, I learned how to use Contentful (Content Manager System -CMS) to enter the logic in the form of JSON arrays that I generated using formulas in Excel so it could be copy-pasted easily despite all the constant changes during the first round of QA
Prepared each testing case for QA and participated in QA sessions where I tested over 1000 use cases the first round as it was the easiest way for me to correct logic; afterwards, I only tested under 500 use cases to help our QA engineer
I also participated was accountable for the bugs that were found during the visual QA testing of the preview and production launch
Post launch learnings
We expected prospecting visitors to use the product finder as their first exploration tool and then, perhaps, learn more by visiting the corresponding product pages; we did not offer a unique experience for current customers based on their need to upgrade or purchase additional devices. By mapping the different user type journeys, we learned that:
Our use case assumption was right, but there were other equally prevalent use cases
Current customers were using the product finder as a way to find the best setup based on their needs and would individually purchase the devices we assume they didn’t have
The product finder is a tool being used as a way to explore the devices prior to research
The product finder seems to be used as a way to confirm the user’s understanding of the product based on their research on product pages
It appears that people who seem to be interested in security offerings are actually interested in a whole ecobee device setup that includes a thermostat
Two significant projects were launched without changes to the product finder, which might be causing confusion for the web visitors
Step 1 asks for interest in...and the options provided were “Security and peace of mind” and “Energy savings and comfort” but the problem with this is that these are the marketing terms and does not speak to the need of the user. We changed this copy to “securing my home” and “saving energy” as a low effort and likely low impact change to learn more, though I could not longer be part of that phase. My recommendation, however, is to fully eliminate this step from the wizard considering that the security offerings on their own are not very popular and have the lowest conversion rate
