A high‑performance user research team scales its impact with in‑the‑moment insights to inform product development.
Square, a commerce platform for small businesses, acquired the website builder Weebly in 2018 with the goal of providing its users a more advanced website builder to bring their brick and mortar businesses online and reach more customers. This meant making adjustments to the existing Weebly platform to meet the needs of Square sellers, as well as migrating Square sellers using its previous website builder to the new, more advanced Square Online Store created by Weebly.
Problem
Transitioning the Weebly platform to meet the needs of Square sellers was a major undertaking that required a detailed understanding of Square customer needs across the journey. The Head of Research for Square eCommerce, Jewel Seperson, recognized the need to scale her team so that they could meet the demand for rapid customer insights. "We needed to fill in the gaps and increase our impact without burning out. It was also important to free up time for the research team to invest in forward-looking projects while continuing to meet the needs of our stakeholders executing the current roadmap."
Solution
Sprig enabled the Square eCommerce research team to provide relevant in-product insights for product managers, designers, and marketers within days. "Sprig is the natural solution because it’s so quick and easy," said Jewel.
Results
In the first few months of using Sprig, the platform had a tangible impact on Square’s business, across a wide range of product and marketing areas. Among other outcomes, the team used Sprig to:
- Increase onboarding success by uncovering previously unknown friction points, then validating improvements as they were implemented
- Inform global go-to-market strategies for product and marketing by improving the team’s understanding of Japanese users’ needs
- Improve the mobile experience by identifying opportunities to solve pain points in the iOS and Android apps
- Rapidly iterate on new feature launches to adapt to the Covid-19 pandemic by rapidly evaluating feature satisfaction, and validating and prioritizing fast-follow features
According to Jewel, "Sprig has been extremely useful in scaling the research team’s impact by speeding up knowledge generation and providing in-the moment, highly relevant insights to our product and marketing teams. As a result, Square has been able to provide a better user experience and give more Square sellers the opportunity to build their businesses online."
Square generated over 100 actionable insights across 5 product areas in its first 6 months.
