Connecting users with
the best software products
TrustRadius aims to be your trusted friend in the world of software and technology. It's where businesses go to get the lowdown on different products before they commit. Users share their experiences, the good, the bad, and the ugly, so you know exactly what you're getting into. Not only does it help buyers, but it also gives companies insights into what they're doing right and where they can improve.
TL;DR TrustRadius is crowdsourcing advice from a bunch of experts who've already been there, done that.
The goal
Help users find the right content and people they need and help them make effective technology purchases.
Users are juggling a lot
when purchasing software
The oversaturated technology space has hit its tipping point and buyers are challenged to do more with less, make strategic technology purchases, and collaborate even more than the prior year on decision-making. In recent years, 87% of technology buyers adjusted their buying process to ensure they only buy mission-critical products that will provide ROI. We set out to discover what buyers are still spending on, why they are more risk-averse than in the past seven years, and how vendor teams can rewrite their strategy to no only connect with those buyers but to make their product searches more effective.
43%
of buyers say the information needed to justify spending has increased
27%
of buyers say that the amount of time, number of decision-makers, and amount of collaboration have all increased
39%
of buyers say their budget has decreased
Learning what our users value most
Buyers are getting more self-sufficient, turning to self-serve resources like free trials (up to 77% from 67% in 2022) before making decisions. They also value product demos (74%) and user reviews. Trying before buying and hearing from current customers is key. Personal experience is gaining traction, with 72% finding it influential. Risk-averse buyers need more justification, leaning on peer reviews and hands-on experience.
We took this information and started to compare it to the TrustRadius experience to see how we stack up meeting user needs.
Helping users organize
their buying process
To help users organize their product buying efforts we created a new feature, Research Boards. The first release focused on allowing users to save products, reviews, and comparisons to a board with the ability to write notes as you investigate products. From there we continued to add product evaluation, requirements, and custom scoring.
This allowed us to learn a few things from our users:
Can they find this new part of the experience?
Is this the right content to start collecting for a buying process?
What other types of content might users want to save?
MVP screens
Initial results and user feedback
While our data and user interviews showed users struggled to find the MVP of Boards, when they did find it they found it to be helpful. With confidence from our initial learnings that this new tool would help buyers, we continued to outline next steps to connect the MVP to the rest of the experience and action on buyer feedback:
Friction points:
Discovering boards
Since we started out with this effort as a test to prove out the value with minimal investment, we now needed to complete the connection by introducing users to the feature and value props.Not integrated with the rest of the Buyer experience
Users were unsure what selecting the heart button on a product would do and if a user did save a product it wasn’t obvious what action they should take next to get value out of that saving interaction.Cold start struggles
How might we help users get started with products when they may not know what category to browse or what solutions are possible?More products on a board = more completed decisions
We learned that users found the most value when they started a board with multiple products. Therefore understanding how we might get a user to add multiple products was key to users finding more success.
A sample of some of the testing to address the friction with boards
Test 1: Research History
Hypothesis:
If we include research history across the Buyer experience with a connection to the boards, users will be able to find their boards once they save products.
Results:
This test led to a fair amount of user engagement but didn’t pull users back to the boards instead functioning only as a navigation tool.
Test 3: Bulk product saves
Hypothesis:
If we give users an easy way to get started with multiple product this will increase user engagement within boards and help users get started with new boards.
Results:
We saw a meaningful increase in the products per board as well as new boards being created.
Test 2: Popover callouts
Hypothesis:
If we call out the boards feature to users that take engagement actions, such as engaging with content or saving a product, we can get more users to create boards and increase product saves.
Results:
Both research boards usage and saves increased
How we began integrating Boards across the experience
This work is still in progress but one area where the team really knocked it out the park already is in the Category pages. By revamping things in a stepped process we were able to ensure we were learning as we went and avoiding causing harm.
Completed changes consisted of:
Reworking the content
Creating touch points for users to indicate requirements for Boards by selecting feature filters
Saving single or multiple products
Creating clarity by connecting the goal of this feature directly with wherever a user is at in their journey.
Results:
3x increase in CTR on products by adding Boards and optimizing for product saves.
What’s next?
The team is still working to bring Research Boards to the rest of the experience and make buying software a breeze.
Integrated boards into the rest of the buyer experience
Apply user feedback to the boards organization
Create more personalized content and recommendations
Continue to build out collaboration features
For more information on this project, reach out via howdymagen@gmail.com