Amanda Briere

What is Zapier?

Easy automation for busy people. Zapier moves info between web apps automatically, so users can focus on their most important work.

My role

On the partner tools team I was focused on both making it easy for partners to embed Zapier into their experiences and ensuring users in partner products could seamlessly automate. 

This was a large cross-functional effort. I worked with my EPD, a UX Researcher, marketing, brand, the partnerships team and other product teams.

The Problem

The existing embed options weren’t meeting partner’s needs. Partners could choose from two main embeds: the Javascript Widget or the Partner API. While this sounds like just a technical difference, there was actually a large impact on both partner’s and their users.

Through collaboration with the UX Research team we identified several problems with these offerings. 

1. While the javascript widget was easy to implement with only one line of code, it wasn’t as customizable as partner’s needed. There was only one component, Zap Templates, and they couldn’t change much on it. The experience was clunky for users having to sign up and manage their apps within Zapier. 

2. On the flip side, the partner API was highly customizable and partners could have a seamless Zapier experience within their app, but this could take months of engineering work, which small and medium companies didn’t have the bandwidth for. 

Goals

• Increase Zapier sign ups

• Reduce time to implement for partners

Elements was a large undertaking since it was taking the end to end Zapier experience and embedding it in partner products. Rather than waiting to have the whole suite of elements ready to launch, we worked incrementally. Choosing one element to launch in a small beta, iterating and releasing new elements.

Leveraging a UXR study I ran a team had a brainstorm. Prior to the brainstorm I asked the team to put themselves in the user’s shoes and go through the end to end flow of two partner products. This helped build empathy for the user. Through the UXR study, conversations w partner managers, partners and our team brainstorm we knew partners needed the end of end Zapier experience in their products.

Rather than working on all the elements at once we decided to work incrementally so we could get value to the users sooner and learn. We discovered that our partners query the partner API /apps endpoint hundreds of times every day, to power or supplement existing app directories. Based on this signal and our ability to deliver on this element fastest we started there. 

In collaboration with my product manager partner we ran two simultaneous studies.

1. Low-context users that hadn’t heard of Zapier before through UserTesting.com

2. Partners of varying company size and roles: product managers, engineers and even for smaller companies their CEO.

I saw in user testing that users’ needed more information about what Zapier was, so I explored different ways to showcase Zapier’s value, while balancing the challenge of not knowing where in the partner experience the intro would go and how much real estate we’d have.

I collaborated with other product teams at Zapier to leverage what worked well for onboarding on the native experience. Through additional user testing I found that we weren’t answering all of users’ questions.

Generator

We needed a way for partners to self-serve and customize the element to their needs. I designed and iterated on a generator based on feedback from partners.

Beta Release

The results of the beta beta were positive,  Our partners prefer the new App Directory Element over our legacy embed offerings.

”The new App Directory Element gave us the opportunity to provide users with an even better experience when searching and integrating with 3rd party apps.” --Any.do

Based on the App Directory Element beta, we iterated and continued moving forward on the holistic experience. 

For each element we user tested and soft launched, all leading to a marketing moment.

Results

The easy-to-use generator shortened the deal cycle, enabling partners to customize and embed Zapier quickly. Since launching it’s driven more signups than the legacy offerings and provided users a seamless experience to automation.