Chartbeat

Product design & management • Jun 2018 – APR 2021

Chartbeat is a data analytics platform that helps content creators grow reader engagement.

Upon joining, I improved the Chartbeat admin experience, introduced identity management with single sign-on (SSO), and made it easier for our users to find help when they need it. I later worked on Audience and Subscriber Reports, which taught me the importance of making data accessible and actionable.

Product work aside, I was a founding member of Chartbeat’s Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) Committee and co-creator of Freshbeats, a company-wide job shadowing program.

Audience and Subscriber Reports

In 2019–2020, Chartbeat developed capabilities that provided micro-level recommendations intended to drive conversions (i.e. suggesting certain articles to be put behind a paywall). While this paywall optimization approach was somewhat successful, it was also restricted by nature.

I was brought on to the team to lead design and research, tasked with the goal of making it easy for customers to access data relevant to their revenue and retention strategies.

Reports consists of two user experiences: the in-product Reports dashboard and email Reports with auto-generated content. Even though the dashboard is where users manage their Reports preferences, most of the magic happens outside of Chartbeat — in their email inboxes.

Designing these experiences in parallel posed some interesting constraints I hadn’t anticipated. For instance, that email is a tricky format due to its built-in size limit and incompatibility with JavaScript. Instead of investing time up front optimizing email layouts, I used lo-fi methods to gauge users’ appetite for subscriber analytics.

I used sketching and Google Sheets to create proof-of-concept reports that were then referenced in surveys and customer interviews to collect feedback:

“I'm hoping this (Reports) is something you can use with ease — it shouldn't seem as challenging as using something like Google Analytics.”
– Audiences Editor

This feedback shaped our team’s product strategy by highlighting which events and data visualizations resonated the most with our users. One key insight from this research that stood out to me was that it reaffirmed Chartbeat’s reputation for democratizing data and this initiative needed to uphold our brand promise.

Audience and Subscriber Reports were released a few months after my departure. View the product announcement on the company blog.

Team: Priyanka Krishnan, Jon Wiggins, Bonnie Ray, Eloise Barrow, and Ron Alleyne.

User management

As Chartbeat’s core product suite evolved with the business, its user management tools went overlooked for many years.

Admins, users responsible for managing their coworkers’ Chartbeat accounts and permissions were forced to navigate through a cumbersome, outdated UX. This made admins reluctant to invite new users by themselves and they often resorted to contacting support instead.

At the start of this project I had lots of ideas and wasn’t sure which direction would be the most effective. Conversations with my colleagues and customers soon revealed that what users really wanted was to feel less overwhelmed.

My team and I focused our attention on building an experience aimed to instill confidence in our admins and streamline their workflows.

Within the first few weeks of launching the updated experience, we saw a drastic increase in new accounts created compared to the same two weeks one year earlier.

The new experience received glowing feedback from our admin users:

The changes brought focus to the people we’d invited but never used Chartbeat … helping us understand the kind of people in our organization who haven’t included it in their routines.

For a deeper look into my process, learn how I used sketching to guide my team’s product development in this ACM Interactions Blog post.

Team: Kris Harbold, Huiru Jiang, Nick Moy, Will Horning, Dolores Quiñonez, Dave Labarbera, and Ron Alleyne.

Single sign-on

Chartbeat’s lack of an identity management solution became a growing concern amongst our existing enterprise client base and prospects, which ultimately hindered overall product adoption.

These customers adopted preventative security workarounds — they’d restrict access to Chartbeat to only a handful of teams as well as limit the total number of user accounts created.

To address our clients’ business needs, we integrated SAML single sign-on (SSO).

To an end-user an ideal SSO experience often feels seamless, like magic! It just works. I wanted to imbue that same emotion into the SAML configuration setup process.

Chartbeat’s integration also allowed organizations to make SSO authentication enforcement optional — to accommodate a temporary testing period — and to let users opt in to SSO if they preferred.

Team: Kris Harbold, Dolores Quiñonez, Dave Labarbera, and Ron Alleyne.

Chartbeat Help

Chartbeat users often struggled to find answers to product questions because the educational content they sought was either difficult to find or didn’t exist. As a result, our Customer Success and Technical Solutions (support) teams wasted their valuable time answering repeat questions and troubleshooting the same issues.

I partnered with members of Chartbeat’s in-house Technical Solutions team to upgrade the company’s self-serve Help Center experience to free up employees’ time that could otherwise be spent building out better relationships with our clients.

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