Jungle Scout

I was hired as the first Senior Content Strategist at Jungle Scout, reporting through the Director of UX in the Product Group. My main task was to support a dozen feature teams with both content design and copywriting. Within the first few months, my manager promoted me to building the nascent content strategy discipline together with our UX researcher within a newly formed UX Core team. That decision was due to the contributions I made on my first project: designing a dashboard for our consumer product in four weeks’ time.

My priority as part of the UX Core team was to dig deeper into the content experience across both our consumer (Orange) and enterprise (Cobalt) products to deliver overall experiences that positively influence customer perception and action.

Examples of top core deliverables/projects:

Created a product style guide along with content management and governance guidelines within a How We Work playbook plus, combined three separate glossaries into one and had it localized in Lokalise
Developed a Content Council to share content best practices among UX, marketing, support, customer experience, and help teams
Built the framework for the first-ever Customer Experience Council for ongoing content usability studies
Created a library of 100 tooltips about the consumer product for weekly updates on the Home Dashboard
Evangelized how to use DittoWords, Figma, and GitHub for content creators across the company
Introduced illustrated tooltips—that I wireframed myself in Figma—for complex advertising, performance, and business concepts and demo’ed them to the UX team, then tested them with customers
Designed all-new empty state landing pages for our major features as a better way to help our customers understand each tool plus, implement telemetry to amplify feedback and track engagement; also, a way to showcase an example of delightful UX with bite-sized video
Conducted first-ever content audit of 1000+ error messages in our consumer and enterprise products and identified poorly written messages that lacked effective mitigation strategies in an effort to improve eroding trust in our platform because sellers were not successful in completing their tasks; also, collaborated with Design to improve design treatments for alerts, notifications, and errors

SCROLL DOWN to view four sample projects

Project One: Home Dashboard

Dashboards are a unique and powerful way to present data-based intelligence using data visualization techniques. Because Jungle Scout’s main selling feature is the power of their data science, we knew we had to build a dashboard that reflected that, even for a v1 release. We knew from our requirements gathering, competitor analysis, and customer interviews—a quick, easy-to-scan format with the most relevant information understandable at a glance—was top of mind, and our results proved we delivered a more than satisfactory solution.

Jungle Scout was falling behind the competition with respect to offering members who subscribed to their consumer product (SaaS) an at-a-glance view of their account. The consumer product for aspiring entrepreneurs to help them sell products on Amazon had not had a major update in 2 years. The engineering and product teams didn’t have the bandwidth to lead a dashboard project nor commit significant resources to it.

The dashboard became the first UX-lead project in the company’s history, and I and a newly hired UX manager were on point to deliver something big, bold, and in time to meet a short window on the developers’ schedule AND launch by Black Friday to align with Marketing’s end-of-the-year plans.
Problem to solve
In Orange, a Seller lands on a tool/feature page before they understand what their needs are or what tools to use and when
New/existing Sellers had:
No at-a-glance summary about the top metrics they care about re: their Amazon business
No defined task- and feature-based pathway to successfully guide their selling journey
No easy way to find additional resources and training other than browsing the cumbersome Academy site
Our impersonal homepage dropped customers into the Product Tracker tool with no instructions on what to do with it. The homepage or the product as a whole had no personal greeting, no empty state encouragement to connect to Amazon, no tool description, and especially, no indication of where customers should start on their seller journey.
Solution
Identified content needs via an audit; focus beyond just the dashboard modules, which would become a competitive differentiator to Helium 10 and Seller Sprite
Helped develop the information architecture for a v1 release; initially, through a Jobs-to-be-done lens
Determined the deployment logic based on the Seller’s journey
Provided messaging that empowered sellers and didn’t just state facts; rewrote definitions based on how they’re used within the phase of the journey the seller is in
Added a top-of-site customer greeting to personalize the experience
Encouraged sellers—through a persuasive empty state message—to sync their Amazon account with their Jungle Scout account for the most in-depth stats
Provided detailed feature descriptions (Use now, Learn how) in the Explore Jungle Scout feature cards section
Offered weekly tips about a tool or online business
Illustrated complex concepts in infotips and bite-sized videos in the Resources section
Listed product and Amazon news & events
With only a month to complete our research and design the prototype, and knowing we had limited dev time, we had to refine our offering and cut back to just the essentials for a v1 launch. My three big wins here were: (a) simplifying the navigation to three main sections, (b) adding links to bite-sized instructional videos and feature descriptions, and (c) insisting on localizing the entire dashboard in all 6 of our markets, including the feedback survey, roadmap site, and Contact Support form.
I was responsible for naming all UI elements, their descriptions, links, and graphical/media elements plus, what story we wanted to tell for a customer journey that Jungle Scout had trouble telling.
I knew our tools were used multiple times in a customer’s journey but for different reasons, and so I wrote separate descriptions for the same tool in all the instances it was used. Our customers loved that!

RESULTS
In a poll, one month after launch:

83% of respondents ranked the dashboard as very useful and the Discover Jungle Scout section as the second highest clicked element on the app.

Home Dashboard: Empty State Message

Before we launched our Home Dashboard, customers were dropped into our Product Tracker tool with no guiding hand as to how the entire Jungle Scout Orange (our consumer product) worked. The business requirement we were tasked to solve was to provide our customers with a way to see their account updates and other resources available to them at-a-glance. The most accurate information about their account would be displayed if they chose to sync their Amazon seller account with their Jungle Scout one.

Because of my “not synced” empty state message below, 51% of respondents connected their Amazon account to Jungle Scout, thus improving the visibility and accuracy of their performance metrics. Before the dashboard, only 11% of our customers connected their accounts.

Home Dashboard: Tool Cards

Many of Jungle Scout’s seller tools are used in different ways depending on two factors: (a) what stage of selling the customer is in—be it researching, marketing, or tracking performance, and (b) whether they’ve synced their Amazon account with their Jungle Scout account. I was tasked with describing these seller tools in one short and inviting sentence.

Over 65% of sellers chose to connect to our tools from the cards listed in the dashboard rather than trying to find them via our left nav bar.

Jungle Scout Home Dashboard Tool Card Problem to Solve

Project Two: Ads Analytics Dashboard

A follow-on to the Home Dashboard that allows users to complete most of their pay-per-click (PPC) monitoring tasks, perform limited data explorations, and receive actionable insights.

Problem
Sellers need help to understand their PPC data and derive actionable insights from it to help them sell more and be more profitable. Currently, we do not provide a solution for this in the Jungle Scout consumer product.
The advertisement analytics feature should allow users to complete most of their PPC monitoring tasks, perform limited data exploration, and receive actionable insights.
Together with the lead designer, we ran two research studies. The first consisted of a dozen customer interviews via Zoom asking them a series of questions about their PPC metrics preferences, including how they’d rank them and why. Then we ran a quantitative survey via Pendo.
We compiled the data and ranked the top four features we needed to include in the v1 release—analyzing PPC performance, PPC insights (Bidding, Ranking, & Top Keywords), competitor insights/category benchmarks, and recommend me new PPC strategies to learn and try.
Then we built desktop and mobile prototypes in Figma and I provided all the content for the overview, sales activity, time picker, and advertising performance pages. I also helped design the onboarding and entry points to the advertising analytics experience plus all content: labels, tooltips, links, and metric card descriptions plus the video script for the training module.

Lastly, I helped draft the success metrics for the baseline and goal levels over a one-month period. They included daily average user, page views, increased Amazon account sync, interaction with page components, user satisfaction rating modal, and the Get Feedback tool.
The v2 release (fall 2022) of this dashboard will include all four remaining metrics that customers identified in our research findings, but were unable to include in v1.

The launch date was May 31st, 2022—two months after my employment ended—so I don’t know the final result, but early customer testing was very positive with 9 out of 9 customers responding favorably.

Content design decision 1 for Ads Analytics

Content design decision 2 for Ads Analytics

Project Three: Illustrated Tooltips

Our consumer and enterprise seller platforms included many complex definitions that required lengthy explanations with big text blocks, which was not a best practice for either tooltip formats or at-a-glance learning. The business goal was to increase comprehension and reduce text. My solution was to build up complex terms in chunks with accompanying illustrations.

I ran an A/B test against our existing text-heavy, text-only tooltips and 71% of participants preferred the illustrated version.

Project Four: Empty State Messaging

None of our tool pages had empty state messages. We just dropped customers into a tool with no explanation of what the tool did or how it could benefit their business. The business requirement was to provide a more helpful empty state message in the form of a short tutorial while also allowing them to give us feedback through a commenting function and providing us with additional analytics re: views.

The image below is a rough v1 that I mocked up. It has since been expanded, though because it isn’t public, I’m unable to share it here. The tutorial was also a single source win in that we took existing long-form educational videos and spliced pieces of it to accommodate the needs of our beginner seller persona. Just enough to understand how to use it without overwhelming them.

Early results were promising: 8 out of 10 beta testers gave the new experience a 5 out of 5 rating.