Sprout Social and Simply Measured Integration (Copy)

Role: Product Designer @ Sprout Social, Lead Product Designer on the Listening team. ♥👂

👋 Welcome to Sprout Social! What the heck is Listening?

In a nutshell, Sprout Social is a social media management and optimization platform. Sprout’s mission is to help organizations and businesses of all sizes become better marketers, create stronger relationships with their customers, be more informed decision makers and create the world’s most beloved brands. Sprout Social’s Listening aligns perfectly to this mission by providing access to the data and insights to do all of those things.

The savviest marketers use social listening to refine their content strategies, inform marketing campaigns and improve overall customer experience on social and beyond. With Sprout Social’s Listening, marketing professionals have the tools necessary to search for keywords, hashtags, brands, industries and multimedia content to analyze sentiment, find topic correlations and uncover trends. The market differentiator with Sprout is that users can then use the rest of the tool to support them throughout the rest of the marketing cycle, from publishing to measuring performance.

🤝Integrating two Listening products into one

In 2017, Sprout Social acquired an industry leading social analytics firm Simply Measured. Simply had many analytics tools I was excited to integrate into Sprout’s product, but none was more challenging and interesting than their Listening product. Throughout 2018, it was on my shoulders to lead the design integration of Simply and Sprout’s Listening tools.

The design of the two products was radically different, but more important to me was that our users were also very different. Sprout’s core user has always been the SMB that perhaps doesn’t have the time and money to devote to an advanced but cumbersome tool that they need to be experts to use. Sprout also chose to go wide instead of deep in our features, so we provide a rich and relatively inexpensive experience across the whole social media management and optimization cycle, but don’t go deep in any area. Simply Measured put all its eggs in the analytics basket, and had more advanced Enterprise users to match. I needed to create an experience that for example the 2 social media experts at the local furniture store wouldn’t be overwhelmed by, and the data analytics team at Netflix wouldn’t be disappointed by.

I started by quickly flowing out each product to see where we overlapped and where there were product gaps. The Sprout tool was still in MVP stage, so there was a lot of work to be done if I wanted to get the functionality of Simply Measured Listening into Sprout Social.

After countless sketches and workshops with my team, we ended up with a beautiful MVP mash up of the two products. The largest areas of focus were the sentiment charts, chart segmenting, message search filters, and advanced query building with multi-network ability. I took Simply’s tool below:

…and transformed it into the MVP version of Sprout Social’s Advanced Listening tool below:

🔮Looking to the future

One of the main goals for 2019 is to revamp our nearly 8 year old UI. This come just in time for my team (Analytics) as we add more features and functionality. Drawing more focus to the content and being strategic with color usage will help our users get the insights they need

🔤 We built the product, now what do we name it?

I was tasked with building out a Listening product that was so advanced and feature rich that it could easily be scaled back and still fit the use cases of more novice users. We worked with Product Marketing and Sales to develop 3 plan tiers: included (All Sprout users would have access to this), a basic add-on, and a more advanced add-on that would include things like more advanced filtering, segmenting, and more networks. The objective was to communicate the incremental value a user gets as they move up the add-on path, while also making it clear that Sprout offers Listening in many different forms.

We started by doing a brain dump of all the names for each plan tier that made sense to us. This was fairly subjective and hard to draw a clear decision from, so I took the names from this table and created a card sort with them with the plans as the buckets. A fun method I’ve learned is to direct Usertesting.com testers to a card sort I have set up in OptimalSort. This way I can gather their thoughts as they rearrange the cards.

The main takeaway was that users preferred Listening as the base plan, with a modifier ended to each plan tier to make it seem more elite. A majority of users arranged the buckets with Listening being the included plan, Listening Plus (or +) and the basic add-on, and Listening Elite as the most advanced add-on. Sales and Product Marketing took these insights into account while building out their positioning and rollout plan.