Company: Google AdWords
Entry submitted by: Agata Krzysztofik (Agata) Program Manager
Community: AdWords Community (www.en.adwords-community.com)
Lithy category: Best Community Design
AdWords is one of Google’s main products, used by millions of businesses worldwide, from multi-million dollar companies to tiny mom-and-pop businesses.
With such a vast group of users, we wanted to create an online space where we could address any product related questions and provide strategic guidance to users in a scalable way.
We launched our AdWords Community on Lithium (in 6 languages) in 2011. The initial design was pretty “simple” reflecting the UI of broadly-known Google products such as Gmail.
Towards the end of 2012 we decide to redesign our Communities (in 8 languages at the time).
Our vision for the new design was “to provide members with a beautiful, engaging and wow! experience, and to make information easy to find”, while focusing on the following business goals:
- Users are able to resolve their issues faster
- Users are more engaged with the Community
- Our Top Contributors are more satisfied with the Community
- Users have an improved perception of experts presence on the Community
- Users have increased satisfaction with ease of navigation
The redesign wasn’t purely limited to a refreshed look, but also incorporated a launch of several brand new Community features that we defined and implemented together with Lithium developers.
The new Community features launched as part of the redesign spanned across 3 main themes:
1) Cleaner interface and easier, more intuitive navigation for user to get engaged
- Custom Promo Carousel (With a banner builder incorporated into the admin)
- More visibility into accepted solutions
- Stream of the most recent discussions and articles
- Recommended reading
- Quick access to follow discussions
- Ability to reply within thread
- At a glance view of discussions by categories
- Quick view of discussion stats
2) Better integration with social
- Users able to add social networks to profile
- Easier social sharing of content across platforms
3) More recognition for engagement
- Achievement badges
- Progress bar of your membership level
- Articles’ author box with integrated Google authorship tag
The redesign has resulted in a 23% increase in the average daily accepted solutions, +28% in daily average kudos clicks and 19% increase in the overall satisfaction with the website (English Community results). The survey conducted among our Top Contributors also indicated overall positive feedback about the new UI combined with the newly added features. The main satisfaction driver among our top-engaged members were the achievement badges (86%).
