Seller Community Evolution
Helping small business owners create community and organic connections.
Role
Product Designer
Skills
UX Research, UX/UI Design, Prototyping, Testing, Project Management
Timeline
Dec 2020 - Nov 2021
Background
The Seller Community is an online, global, virtual chamber of commerce and the world’s largest gathering of Square Sellers. It is a social network where sellers can ask and answer any question about how to use our products, and how to run and grow their business with Square. The Community brings sellers with similar interests together, and perhaps most importantly, provides a space where Square can engage with them in a 1:many format, allowing us to connect with hundreds and even thousands of sellers and potential new customers through a single interaction. Learn more about what Square does.
Project Overview
Square began a full redesign of its Seller Community platform with the vision of becoming a virtual chamber of commerce, enabling Square sellers to interact with one another and with the Square brand outside of a direct support experience.
While Square’s design system has evolved over the years, the Seller Community has stayed more or less the same since its inception in 2016. The goal of this project was to bring the Seller Community up-to-date and align it with the rest of Square’s current web and app experiences while also greatly improving its usability for sellers.
The Challenge
Square had dedicated design teams for all their web and app properties except for Seller Community. As a result, the Community suffered from outdated design and numerous technical issues, leading to a subpar experience for both sellers and employees. In 2018, the lead of the Seller Community approached me to redesign some of its features. Despite lacking previous experience in the role, my extensive background as the Seller Community's Digital Engagement Specialist, coupled with my ability to quickly acquire new creative skills, made me an ideal candidate in her eyes.
I started launching small-scale projects that gradually enhanced the Community. These initiatives involved revamping the Group Hubs feature, modernizing the Blogs pages, and establishing the Beta Community, which served as a sub-community enabling sellers to report bugs, make feature requests, and participate in the beta program. My efforts eventually landed me a full-time position as the Seller Community Product Designer in 2019. With my new official title and more experience under my belt, I turned my focus to addressing the underlying issues within the Community and embarked on the ambitious Evolution project, aiming for a complete overhaul and transformation.
Group Hubs
Blog Pages
Beta Community
(click to expand mockups)
The Research
User interviews
From the feedback gathered in surveys and user interviews, we uncovered two key themes or problems to solve.
Sellers expect to find information as quickly as possible so they can spend more time running their business. Timeliness is especially important for sellers who may only need to find a specific answer and are visiting the Community from a search run through Google or Square’s on-site search tool. This group of sellers typically do not wish to engage further.
SELLERS CAN’T FIND THE RIGHT INFORMATION QUICKLY
It’s important to sellers that they are able to learn about each other’s first-hand experiences both with Square products and how they run their business. More experienced sellers on the Community have gained the understanding that it provides an on-demand pool of business advice and guidance. However, many sellers have also expressed that the current state of the Community leans more towards a troubleshooting forum than a place to connect with one another.
SELLERS DON’T UNDERSTAND HOW THE COMMUNITY IS USEFUL FOR THEIR BUSINESS
Seller Journey Maps
Competitive analysis
To gain insight on specific tools and features that we could potentially utilize to create a best-in-class Community experience, we decided to conduct a competitive analysis on other online communities who are ranked highly within the industry. Based on our two key problems listed above, we focused on how each community handled the following categories.
INFORMATION ARCHITECTURE
We hypothesized that addressing issues with information architecture would directly resolve problems both with sellers being unable to find answers quickly, and also with clarifying for sellers how to navigate and leverage different areas of the site. This work would enable sellers to quickly and easily find the answers and functionalities they are looking for.
PEER-TO-PEER ENGAGEMENT
Engagement between members is the core of any online community experience. Successfully building features and creating a content strategy that allow organic relationships to develop powers the engine that makes a community productive and valuable.
OVERALL DESIGN EXPERIENCE
The current experience of visiting the Community can be jarring for sellers, as the site and overall appearance feel out of touch with the rest of the Square web and product experiences that are a part of their daily lives. By updating our visual design to better align with other parts of Square and creating clearer CTAs that define the actions available to sellers in a given space, we can more easily showcase to sellers the benefits available to them in the Community.
The Solutions
INFORMATION ARCHITECTURE
A simpler breakdown of high-level topics to create more distinguishable boundaries between support and non-support channels within the Community. This offers sellers clear, direct paths to access the related sub-communities that they’re interested in.
Restructuring the homepage to include a variety of content so that it serves as a hub that highlights all of the ways sellers can participate within the Community.
Overall Design Experience
Identify any shortcomings in the area of web accessibility and make sure they are addressed. Because of the amount of time that has passed since the original design was created, the Seller Community is due for an accessibility audit. This ensures that we are catering to all sellers equally including those with disabilities.
Update visual elements to the new Square design system to create a more cohesive experience across Square properties.
Explore opportunities where we can pivot away from text. Using more images and color blocks to organize pages may increase the speed in which sellers are able to identify pertinent information and quickly navigate through the site.
ALLOW USERS TO SET UP PAYMENTS PROCESSING WITHIN THE SIGN UP FLOW
Create borderless spaces in the Community where sellers can connect with each other no matter where they are in the world.
Update profile page where sellers can showcase more information about themselves to each other, catch up on their conversations, and find personalized content based on their pre-selected interests.
Improve incentives to participate by revamping the badging system with clearer instructions on how to achieve them.
Create more visible CTAs on conversation pages to encourage interaction.
Site maps
Original site map
Updated site map
