Hustle is the leading peer-to-peer text messaging platform for Non-Profits, Politics, and Education that allows organizers to have personalized conversations with their supporters at scale.
Organizers using Hustle often received low response rates and used trial and error to figure out how to run an engaging text campaign. As an authority in the industry, Hustle needed to deliver more value in product by educating clients on how to write better scripts, in hopes of increasing engagement.
How might we provide Admins with the guidance they need to write more effective scripts?
UX & UI Design
UX & UI Research
User Testing
Visual Design
Yana Kuzmina, PM
David Yang, Developer
Competitive research
No competitors offer real-time suggestions in product, giving Hustle an opportunity for a competitive advantage
Comparative research
Other text analyzers (Grammarly), complex software that surfaces tips and recs (Greenhouse), consumer-friendly products surfacing tips throughout a workflow (Airbnb)
Internal feedback
Hustle customers and prospects express significant interest re: how to write the most effective scripts
User interviews
Org Admins are creating their scripts elsewhere (like Google docs) and copy & pasting their scripts into Hustle
Over 1 billion text messages have been sent through Hustle, which has allowed our data team to analyze the content of these conversations and develop the following best practices to use as a starting point for admins to develop effective scripts.
No links in the first message
Links decrease response rates by 240%
Keep it short
Texts under 160 characters generates 50% more responses
Introduce yourself
Adding the agent name boosts response rate by 40%
Address your contact
Use your contact’s name to boost response rates by 90% and this practice builds stronger relationships
Early on, we agreed as a team that these script recommendations should not be disruptive to a user's workflow, so initial iterations included a step where a user would have to explicitly click to analyze their script.
After internal testing with product and dev, we agreed that this step was unnecessary and the dev team would be able to automatically analyze the script, provided the design was non-obtrusive.
A request we frequently heard from our clients was the ability to preview their message in-app. Early in the design process, I included a Preview Message feature in my explorations, which helped illustrate the value of this functionality. This generated enough excitement internally to increase the scope of this project to include this as a value-add, while still maintaining our original timelines.
How do we know if we built a useful feature? As a team, we aligned that the following questions would help us measure success and give us an idea of next steps for the future of this feature.
Are admins interacting with the suggestions in the side panel?
Are admins improving their scripts based on Hustle’s suggestions?
Are admins creating scripts that increase engagement?
Next steps
Are users becoming fatigued after seeing the initial 4 suggestions repeatedly? What other suggestions/best practices would be helpful to surface here?
