This was one of the most challenging projects for me as a Product Designer at Yahoo. Due to the complexity, it required different teams to work hand in hand, however, COVID-19 brought a new work mode that we never experienced, we had to 100% remotely work. I took full ownership of the design, also made contributions to make product decisions. We used this project as a model to explore new work and collaboration methods which we are widely using across the whole team, and implemented it as planned.

When: 2020

My role: Design Lead, Content Strategy, Project Management

Platform: Web/iOS/Andriod ( Desktop, mobile, tablet )

Team roles: Product Manager, Copy Writer, UI Engineers, Platform Engineers, Customer Support team, Legal Team, Account Manager

Work/Collaboration mode: 100% remote

YAHOO LEGACY WEBSITE

EDITOR UPDATE

Yahoo Hosting plans have older website editors that are still in use by the customers since 1998. We decided to remove these editors from use because we don't have engineering resources to provide technical support anymore, also the old product doesn't create mobile-friendly sites.

The plan is that by March 31, 2021, all customers using our legacy website building service will be notified that at a future date, they will not be able to publish any more content to their sites using these editors. Users need to be directed to our more modern editors that also produce mobile-friendly sites:

Website Builder: mobile-friendly sites, >100 themes
WordPress: popular editor in the industry

APPROACHING AND RETAINING EXISTING CUSTOMERS

The user base was over 80k existing customers. Most of them have been Yahoo Website Builder customers for over a decade. We needed to be very careful about how to inform them of this information, otherwise, we were taking the risks of losing our loyal customers. Also, we needed to provide a seamless experience to guide them to the new website building tools, especially helped them find out what is the best tool that fits their needs ( business needs and budget).

PERSONA

There are two main types of target users: free users and paid users.

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USER SCENARIOS

AND FLOWS

Scenario 1:

Existing customers receive notifications (Email or YSB dashboard) and update to free website builder service

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Scenario 2:

Existing customers receive notifications ( (Email or YSB dashboard) and update to WordPress for free

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Scenario 3:

Existing customers receive notifications (Email or YSB dashboard) and hire experts to build their websites

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THE NEW EXPERIENCE

Notification: Email and Dashboard pop-up

EMAILS LAYOUT

In 2020, I designed all of our marketing emails which have grown our email subscribers from 115K to 1.4M.

Interested in viewing them? Click here.

DASHBOARD NOTIFICATIONS

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One notification, three options

I worked with the UX Copywriter to modify our languages to make sure we notified our customers effectively and friendly. Two Q& A were added to help us gain understandings from them.

Bold title, people hate reading long body texts.

User cases and relevant solutions

Get more understandings from customers

Fun fact

Decision 1: My website is fine the way it is and I do not / will not need to make any updates ever.

Solution: Guided them to check how well their websites perform to potentially change their ideas to update their website building tools to get better performance.

DO NOTHING

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Decision 2: I would like to make a new business website myself.

Solution: We clearly explained and compared the two free website building tools ( Website builder and WordPress), help them make decisions and provide a flow for them to use.