SurveyMonkey Forms
Enabling business owners and professionals to easily create professional forms in a single, easy-to-use platform.
opportunity
Boosting business efficiency with a simplified forms solution
Small business owners and professionals across events, HR, education, marketing, customer experience and more often gather information for a specific purpose, like contact information for a mailing list and collect registration fees for an event. Nailing the "first impression" with their customers is really important for these users. It is also essential for business owners and professionals to have the information gathered flowing seamlessly through all the other apps used every day.
Beginning in 2023, I led the design of a new solution to help small businesses and professionals create engaging web forms with purpose-built templates, customizable fields, and third-party integrations. All the new features were built on the existing SurveyMonkey platform, creating a powerful tool for collecting information.
In this initiative, I worked with a large cross-functional group of product managers, researchers, engineers, marketers, and business strategists.
forms mvp
Defining the MVP
My first task, coming into the project, was to partner with the lead product manager to uncover opportunities in SurveyMonkey's platform and define the requirements for the MVP.
I started the work by referring to research done by the product marketing team that assessed the market opportunity and identified, at a high level, top use cases for Forms users.
Following this initial step, I conducted a competitive analysis, mapping the flow of the top competitors. In parallel, I mapped the SurveyMonkey flow, considering different entry points and account types (free, paid, and enterprise). This analysis allowed me to identify the functionality the team needed to build to launch a competitive product.
The scope of the MVP included replacing the Contact Information Question with four new, more robust form fields (Name, Email, Phone, Address). As part of the MVP, I also needed to simplify the flow for embedding a form into a website and improve the tabular view for responses.
Testing the MVP design
As part of the design process and to have a deep understanding of the viability of the MVP, I created mid-fidelity end-to-end prototypes in Figma to test with UserTesting. The results helped me iterate on the designs and gave the team more confidence to move forward.
forms vision
Creating the vision for SurveyMonkey Forms
Customer interviews
While the design work for MVP was progressing, I started working on the vision for the future of SurveyMonkey Forms—the vision aimed to identify the opportunities and inform the product roadmap that would make us win in the Forms market.
I partnered with the product researcher to plan and conduct customer interviews to gain in-depth knowledge of the customers' use cases and unaddressed needs.
We wanted to understand how people used SurveyMonkey to create forms, if they perceived forms and surveys to be different, and how that perception would impact the value they could get from the tool. We interviewed 13 participants and learned that:
Users perceived forms and surveys to be similar at a higher level but different at the use case level
Forms use cases require some very specific features (e.g., advanced styling, purpose-built field, website embedding)
The ideal forms experience is unified by a smaller tool stack and an integrated workflow
Cross-functional ideation workshop
At this point in the project, the team had acquired a solid body of knowledge about market opportunities, competitors' landscape, use cases and customer needs. I wanted to leverage this knowledge to create the vision of an exceptional Forms offering.
I planned a cross-functional ideation workshop and invited representatives of different teams involved in the project. The group included designers, researchers, product managers, content writers, engineers, product marketers, and business strategists.
In a FigJam board, I created a Concept Matrix. On one axis were listed key challenges identified in the research; on the other, high-level moments on the user journey. I asked participants to generate ideas that would address the challenges at each moment of the journey. We finalized the workshop with the prioritization of the ideas.
The cross-functional workshop provided the data-informed direction for the vision and created a sense of shared ownership among those involved in the project.
Moving ideas forward
Following the workshop, I started working on a prototype that synthesized the ideas generated into a tangible artifact for the team to refer to and discuss. The vision prototype was presented to the executive team and the board to help them visualize the solution and support the roadmap.
Another way to move the ideas forward was by taking one of the concepts suggested in the workshop and turning it into a hackathon project. The project consisted of a feature that customized colours and fonts of a form based on any website URL (a small feature with high value for forms users). This project won the hackathon in the category of Best Product Innovation.
Storytelling to get ideas across
Throughout the project, I used storytelling several times to communicate ideas, instigate discussions and get buy-in. I created these stories based on actual use cases with fictional businesses and users. That proved very effective in creating a deep connection between the team and the problem we were solving.
One example is the story of the Shanti Yoga Studio, which I used to present the MVP in a company town hall meeting. The story illustrates the journey of a small studio using SurveyMonkey Forms to improve its system for online registration.
Launching SurveyMonkey Forms
In September 2023, SurveyMonkey launched its new SurveyMonkey Forms offering with a strong marketing campaign. The forms offering included key features such as:
Pre-designed form fields and layouts which users can personalize to deliver a winning customer and candidate experience
Simplified web embedding configurations to enable users to add a form to their website effortlessly
50+ new and improved customizable templates to help users quickly and easily create online forms for common use cases
All-new list view of responses for an efficient way to analyze and act on responses individually, right in SurveyMonkey
An extensive library of integrations with workplace tools, such as MailChimp, Zapier, and Google Sheets
Following the launch of the new offering, I continue to work on the Forms projects, executing the vision and designing the features in the roadmap.
