Reputation Programs

Leveling Up Reputation’s Design Team

Reputation’s design team has historically placed a heavy emphasis on quickly pushing out feature work, often at the expense of other important aspects of design. Specifically, there was a noticeable gap in our efforts to prioritize accessibility, user research, and content design. Our team had a limited understanding of how to design for users with disabilities, rarely involved users in our research process, and often overlooked the importance of copy. To tackle these challenges, I spearheaded new initiatives in each of these areas and created sustainable and structured approaches for our design team.

CUSTOMER RESEARCH PANEL EMAIL

USER RESEARCH

Better Understanding Our Users

User research happened once in a blue moon at Reputation and was often very inefficient. Surveys had low response rates and user interviews were generally conducted with limited and repetitive participants. This resulted in an incomplete understanding of our users' needs, behaviors, and experiences. To address this issue, I consulted with user researchers and reviewed online research findings to develop an improved approach.

My proposed solution was to offer incentives to participants and establish a customer research panel to recruit a diverse pool of participants, reduce recruitment time, and ensure high-quality feedback. I presented this program to my manager and higher-ups, who approved the idea.
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As a result of this initiative, we have successfully recruited 30 participants representing five industries and various roles. The panel has provided us with valuable insights into our users' experiences and has helped us shape the future of our platform. Going forward, we will continue to improve our user research methods to ensure we are meeting the needs of our users.

ACCESSIBILITY PLAYBOOK SLIDES

ACCESSIBILITY

The Journey to Becoming ADA Compliant

Accessibility has long since been the elephant in the room at Reputation. Despite the company’s desire to become ADA compliant, particularly with our many healthcare clients, the challenge of it felt overwhelming, and no one seemed willing to take on the responsibility of tackling such a significant effort. I recognized the need for action and knew that I needed to take the first step toward making a real change in our organization.

To get started, I turned to research, brushing up on my knowledge and reaching out to experts. I worked on educating our product team and company leadership on the importance of accessibility in our products. I achieved this by presenting at leadership meetings, holding lunch and learn sessions, sharing accessibility resources and checklists, and starting an accessibility advocates group that included members from different departments.

One of my biggest successes was getting Reputation to work with Level Access, a leading accessibility consulting firm, to conduct formal accessibility audits of our products. This initiative helped us identify and address accessibility issues across our offerings.

While we are not yet formally ADA compliant, we are committed to continuously improving our accessibility efforts and making our products more inclusive for all.

REPUTATION SCORE RECOMMENDATIONS

CONTENT DESIGN

The Power of Words

The platform copy at Reputation tended to be overly complex and too technical. The lack of attention to copy also resulted in inconsistencies across the platform, with the same content being phrased in multiple ways. To address these issues leading to confusion among users, I crafted an action plan that included creating a style guide, performing a content audit to build a database of copy, and more.

We started by creating a copy component library that tracked the most commonly used copy such as CTAs, alerts, and more. This became an important reference tool that empowered designers to create consistent and coherent copy across the platform.

I also rewrote critical parts of the platform, including Reputation Recommendations. This is an important part of our platform that teaches companies how to improve their customer experience and increase their Reputation Score. However, the original recommendations, written by data scientists, were difficult to understand. I simplified the content to make it user-friendly and easily comprehensible. As a result, we immediately saw an increase in usage the following month.