Monotype

Introduction

Monotype's typeface SaaS platform, designed to address the market need for a centralized font licensing solution, offered a valuable solution for managing font licenses, yet customer renewals were lower than anticipated. My research explored the customer journey, from initial awareness to ongoing platform usage, to identify pain points and opportunities for improvement across the product, user experience, and service design.

Role and Responsibilities

As the UX Researcher, I led a mixed-methods research initiative to evaluate the SaaS platform and the surrounding customer journey. My responsibilities included: conducting a heuristic analysis, moderating customer interviews, facilitating internal stakeholder workshops, synthesizing research findings, and collaborating with Product, Design, Marketing, Sales, Customer Service, and Account Management teams.

The Challenge

Monotype's SaaS platform provided access to a library of licensed fonts, a crucial resource for many customers. However, the platform wasn't meeting customer expectations, leading to low renewal rates. Customers anticipated the platform would streamline their font management tasks, but many found it cumbersome and time-consuming, negatively impacting their workflows. This disconnect between expectation and reality needed to be addressed.

The Research Process

My research approach combined evaluative and generative methods:

• Heuristic Analysis: I assessed the platform's key interfaces and user flows using both bespoke and industry-standard heuristics. This evaluation identified several usability issues related to wayfinding, accessibility, and search functionality.
• Customer Interviews: I conducted customer interviews to understand their experiences with the platform and the overall Monotype service. These interviews revealed a mismatch between customer expectations (set during marketing and sales) and the actual platform experience. Customers felt the platform added to, rather than simplified, their font selection process.
• Stakeholder Workshops: To align internal teams on the research findings and collaboratively develop solutions, I co-facilitated a two-day service design workshop with key stakeholders from Product, Design, Marketing, Sales, Customer Service, and Account Management.

Key Insights

The research uncovered several key insights:

• Usability Issues: The heuristic analysis revealed usability problems impacting navigation, accessibility, and search.
• Misaligned Expectations: Customer interviews highlighted a disconnect between pre-sales expectations (of streamlined font management) and the reality of using the platform.
• Workflow Friction: Customers felt the platform added friction to their workflows, increasing the time required to select fonts.
• Service Gaps: The customer journey mapping exercise revealed gaps in the overall service experience, including inconsistent communication and limited support resources for new users.
• Internal Alignment: The workshop highlighted the need for better internal alignment between different teams (Marketing, Sales, Product, Design, Customer Service) to ensure a consistent and positive customer experience throughout the entire journey.

The Solution

The research insights directly informed several improvements:

• SaaS Feature Roadmap Re-prioritization: The stakeholder workshop resulted in a re-prioritization of the near-term SaaS feature roadmap, focusing on addressing the identified usability issues and workflow friction.
• Enhanced Customer Support Services: The workshop also led to improvements in customer support services to better manage customer expectations and provide assistance with the platform.
• UX Updates: Based on the heuristic analysis and customer feedback, UX updates were implemented to improve wayfinding, accessibility, and search functionality, creating a more intuitive platform and enhanced user experience.

Results and Impact

The implemented UX updates and service enhancements resulted in a more intuitive platform and enhanced user experience. The project successfully aligned internal teams and led to concrete improvements in the platform and customer support services, addressing the core issues contributing to low renewal rates. The re-prioritized roadmap and enhanced support services laid the foundation for future improvements and increased customer satisfaction.

Key Learnings

This project demonstrated the power of integrating UX research with service design principles to address complex challenges. It is essential, from the beginning, to understand each service touchpoint, and align internal teams around a shared vision to create a seamless and satisfying experience. In future projects, I would prioritize mapping the service touchpoints and facilitating cross-functional collaboration early in the design process to proactively identify and address potential service gaps.