AnyRoad AtHome

A response to COVID-19

The Context

Amid the COVID-19 crisis, brands that traditionally focused on in-person branded experiences faced the urgent need to pivot towards virtual experiences as a means to drive engagement, foster community, and sustain revenue. This rapid transition to the online landscape brought forth a multitude of challenges, including ensuring the quality of execution, capturing essential data, and measuring the impact effectively. To tackle these hurdles head-on, AnyRoad introduced 'atHome,' a feature that seamlessly integrates our product suite with popular streaming platforms.

My Role

As the lead product designer spearheading this swift solution, I played a pivotal role in its development. My responsibilities encompassed conducting user interviews, leading workshops, crafting user flows, sketching wireframes, and delivering comprehensive visual mockups and detailed specifications. Throughout the iterative process, I closely collaborated with the Experience Director and another product designer, actively seeking and incorporating their valuable design feedback. In addition, I established strong partnerships with product managers, account managers, and engineers, offering ongoing design support throughout the development and testing phases.

Objectives

Empower our customers to excel in this new environment.
Set ourselves apart from conventional web event hosting platforms such as Zoom webinars.
Guarantee a positive and personalized participant experience, fostering engagement and willingness to invest.
Achieve a successful launch within a tight 3-week timeframe.

Challenge

How can we swiftly adapt a system initially designed for live in-person experiences to offer equivalent advantages for virtual experiences, all while ensuring that the user experience remains familiar to our marketplace users?

Solution

We seamlessly integrated the capability to utilize third-party video conferencing services within our existing booking and reservation cloud system. Partners now have the flexibility to select any video conferencing service and easily incorporate its unique links into the experiences hosted on our platform. Customers benefit from automated access and reminders. This solution not only streamlines operational processes for businesses but also offers the opportunity to collect valuable first-party data, which we leverage through our platform.

Success Metrics

197,507 Bookings for Online Experiences (Apr 3 – Jul 30).
AnyRoad NPS increased to 75 from 70.
Michaels to launch Kids Club and National Classes in Canada in both French and Englishdue to success in US.
Customers are hosting more virtual large scale events with 10-15k sign ups.
Michaels continued to run online events due to the popularity and new audiences they are reaching even after in-store events resume.

The Questions

In the initial stages, I facilitated a workshop with the team to generate a wide range of questions pertaining to the product. We drew upon our collective understanding of the existing product and explored how it would function within a virtual context.

The Journey

I conducted an in-depth analysis of the customer journeys for our two user types, identifying specific touchpoints to focus on. My primary objective was to ensure that the user experience remained relatively consistent and familiar, with minimal disruption to what users were already accustomed to.

The Touchpoints

Introducing this feature necessitated careful considerations across multiple aspects of our system, including the internal administrative tool, the customer dashboard, the guest-facing check-out process, automated emails sent to both guest and customers, as well as a web portal utilized by external instructors.

Who owns the Zoom?

We faced the crucial decision of defining the ownership structure for video conference accounts: whether they should be owned by AnyRoad, the partners, or the teachers. This choice had far-reaching implications for various UX elements. Some argued in favor of AnyRoad owning the accounts to streamline training, gather more data, and enhance security. Conversely, others advocated for a hands-off approach to minimize management efforts, reduce costs, and mitigate additional liability.

In the end, we opted for hosts to have ownership of their own Zoom accounts, although our initial approach differed. We concluded that, for a small sample BETA, it made more sense for us to take ownership of the Zoom accounts, allowing us full control and enabling us to gain firsthand insight into what partners would otherwise be managing. I strongly advocated for this decision, particularly for research purposes. However, we quickly encountered scalability limitations and unanticipated shifts in Zoom's security policies.

Where is "online" located?

Up to this point, our system was intricately tied to physical locations, impacting various aspects such as maps, displayed locations, timezones, scheduling, bookings, calendar views, and more. However, transitioning to an online experience posed a unique challenge. To address this, I explored several ideas aimed at minimizing development time, rigorously testing each concept with relevant team members.

These ideas included:

Utilizing a physical location while concealing any addresses from the consumer UX.
Crafting custom locations using a physical address in each timezone, accompanied by distinct names such as 'Online – Eastern Time.'
Generating unique 'fake' virtual locations when creating an experience.

After numerous iterations and discussions, I successfully advocated for the allocation of engineering resources to create a new experience type that would no longer rely on physical locations.

How does the guest access the meeting link?

Given our existing email system, my initial inclination was to incorporate the meeting link directly within our automated emails. This approach offered the advantage of relatively low development effort while providing users with convenient access to the link within their email inbox. Additionally, it appeared to be a straightforward UI design endeavor.

However, before proceeding, I conducted thorough research by examining expert event hosting platforms, including EventBrite and Airbnb, to gain insights from real-world practices. Furthermore, I leveraged insights from our manual stealth BETA phase to evaluate link usage behavior during setup and execution. During this analysis, I pinpointed a significant pain point: the need to update meeting links. Embedding direct links within emails introduced the challenge of ensuring that users always had the most up-to-date link, necessitating additional communication.

To address this issue, I made the strategic decision to design a new landing page, guaranteeing users a consistently valid link to their virtual experience.