Projects | Custom Properties for Octane AI

Introduction

Based in San Francisco – USA, Octane AI is the leading quiz platform on Shopify and acts on two major pillars by recommending products to customers by their preferences and also helps merchants on collecting leads, boosting their marketing campaigns, all of that in a no-code platform where all types of users can use the builder to create quizzes and leverage their contact list through app integrations.

The problem

Octane AI is integrated with the industry’s go-to platforms (Klaviyo, Zapier, Recart, etc) so merchants can connect their quizzes directly into them and start leveraging their campaigns. Once the quiz is connected and your data properly set up, it flows automatically and in real time.

The more people take your quiz, the wider and better is your campaign audience, but that’s not an easy task. Each product can have many custom properties, and stores have dozens if not hundreds of products, beyond that, quizzes have behavioral, demographic and economic custom properties, and lastly the quiz values (questions and answers).

Merchants need to attach these custom properties to the answers, so that they can manage the product recommendations and how they structure their leads for future campaigns. The nature of the builder makes it so the property editing is linear and slow, and while this can be a mild task on short quizzes it isn’t really scalable to larger and complex quizzes, in which the experience becomes cumbersome and frustrating.

The raw data output of custom properties on a fairly short example quiz.

Editing a single property requires several clicks, a quiz this size requires roughly 90 to 120 clicks alone.

Research

The interviews were divided into 2 user groups:

Account Managers

The most knowledgeable users of the platform, as they build intricate and complex quizzes daily for their customers

New users

New users accounted for more than half of inactive quiz users on the platform, indicating their struggle with its complexity

Key Insights

Here’s the synthesized insights of user interviews (sample size of 5 users):

Insight #1

It takes too much time to configure all properties properly, and if not done properly, the output data isn’t as helpful.

Insight #2

Users keep their quizzes overly simplified and not making use of full potential because it isn’t feasible to build complex quizzes without a dedicated Account Manager.

Insight #3

Due to it being very time consuming to manage properties, some store owners refrain creating seasonal or limited-time quizzes, limiting their opportunities.

Insight #4

Due to the linear nature of property management, It’s hard to keep track of things and be consistent with naming convention and error prevention.

With that, we’ve framed our problem into the statement:

"How might we ensure users properly manage their quiz properties in a timely manner?"

Ideation

Due to it being a core functionality at Octane AI and relevant from a business perspective, this feature have had several iterations in the past in different shapes and sizes, so we’ve build on top of past (and good!) ideas while also leveraging the new insights we’ve collected.

Many iterations and variables were explored and considered

- Competitor analysis
- Development efforts
- Design patterns and consistency
- User adoption

Based on our learnings, we’ve established two main criteria for the solution:

Criteria #1

Preserve the ability to manage properties individually

Legacy behavior ensures a smooth transition for users who feel comfortable with the current state of the feature, while incentivizing the transition to a new way to interact with properties.

Criteria #2

Dedicated space for global properties

Enables overview, ease of management, error prevention and time efficiency.

Information architecture

The key factor when designing the new information architecture was to ensure users would have a two-way navigation between the questions/answers (and their local custom properties) and the global custom properties settings, that would minimize friction on their experience, reducing time and effort, while also providing overview and agency.

The legacy architecture to manage properties: linear and one by one.

The new architecture to manage properties: centralized, fast to manage, easy to scan and modify.

User Interface

The addition of the custom properties global settings as highlighted in green. The new “custom properties” option lead users to the global properties settings.

Alternatively, once inside the answer panel (and deep in the navigation tree), users can use the shortcut to navigate to the global properties settings.

The new global custom properties panel, that offers a several benefits for users.

Increase awareness

With an overview of all properties in the system, users can prevent mistakes and conform to naming convention.

Two way navigation

Shortcuts are available inside the answers panel and global custom properties panel so that users have a quick pathway to navigate between answers and the properties overview.

Deeper customization and control

While property names are automatically generated, users can override that function and with the overview, ensure they can immediately spot inconsistencies on overrides, and reset them if needed.

Conclusion

This was a big technical and UX challenge in which there were many different routes to consider when bringing the solution to life, balancing addressing user needs, business needs, development cost, design pattern and other variables factor in how the team approached it.

I feel confident we’ve come with an elegant solution that should greatly improve user experience, and evaluate its performance over time is a natural step to gauge it’s quantifiable impact.