Evaluating user experience of AdWords in-product self help tool

Google AdWords is an online advertising service that enables advertisers to compete to display brief advertising copy to web users.

Context:

To enhance the self-help experience and reduce the cost of managed help, Google introduced in product contextual help tools. After a year of launch, there was no significant increase in users adoption. Google Adwords team launched a validation drive to understand the barriers and pain-points around contextual help adoption. 

My Role:

I led the validation drive and planned and conducted the same with the Adwords users. To cover  a wide range of persona and enhance the depth of findings studies were conducted with novice, expert and new Adwords users. Over 10 users were interviewed to elicit usage trends, perceptions, and behavior around publishing advertisements which in turn drew out painpoints and opportunities for improvements to contextual help panel. A combination of think-aloud, retrospective think- aloud was used to uncover issues around discoverability and affordance.

After the study, the findings were collated, prioritized and shared with the Adwords team. As the User Research lead, I created User research finding backlog and tracked the design iteration with the Program Manager, designers, content strategist and development teams. The findings fed into product development plan and led to further design iterations.

 
 

Findings and Suggestions

  • Increase awareness: Help lies within the Settings menu, as a result of which people have a perception that they cannot access Help from within the product.
  • Swap contact and articles boxes within the Panel: An A/B test should be conducted to swap these and measure how it affects time users spend on the panel and the number of escalations coming in through it.
  • Modify content: Modifying content that reduces scrolling serves as a quick solution, instead of the entire description of features, etc. This will encourage users to use the panel for quick tips and how-to's and basic introductions. For anything more detailed, links can be provided in the panel pointing to the detailed articled in the Help Center which already exist.