Mythos’ Survey Creation Tool
Enhancing Survey Tools to Empower Universities in Data Collection
Overview
Mythos is an all-in-one platform that streamlines how donor relations teams communicate with their donors. It is used by donor relations teams to collect, manage, and publish data for donors, functioning as a comprehensive survey, story management, and publishing tool.
Scope: Client Project
Duration: Two weeks
Tools: Figma
Role: UX Researcher & Designer
Team Members: Group Project
Our UX Design team was approached by Mythos to improve their survey creation tool. Universities use this tool to gather data and stories from students and faculty receiving scholarships and funding.
The Challenge
Users frequently encounter errors when formatting their data to match the platform requirements. This leads to frustration, slows down the process, and necessitates extensive back-and-forth communication with the Mythos customer service team.
Because users lack the tools to resolve these errors independently, they rely heavily on Mythos for troubleshooting. This creates a growing burden on the Mythos team and poses scalability challenges as their customer base expands.
Discover
Before conducting user interviews with existing clients, we ensured that we first understood the platform and its intricacies. To accomplish this, we met with the Mythos team and participated in the onboarding training provided to all new clients partnering with Mythos. This process allowed us to explore the platform and empathize with the user experience.
Lack of Guidance for Completing Surveys
We discovered that users lacked clear instructions for completing surveys. Without guidance, they often filled the survey from top to bottom, following the flow outlined below. This was the state of the application before our design proposal solution.
Complex and Hidden Features in the Mythos Survey Tool
After understanding the user flow for completing surveys, we conducted a heuristics evaluation to identify major usability issues. This evaluation revealed several challenges:
1.Personalization Fields
Personalization fields allow a customer’s data to flow into messages, enabling users to address survey participants directly (e.g., by first name). However, using this feature required manual coding. For instance, addressing a participant by first name required entering ##first_name##, which had to exactly match the column header in the Excel document uploaded during the final step. This created a high likelihood of user errors because a single typo could result in failed responses. Furthermore, personalization fields were not mentioned anywhere in the platform interface, making them inaccessible to users who hadn’t received onboarding training or read through detailed guides.
Many essential features, such as duplicating surveys, were buried in dropdown menus and difficult to locate. For example, duplicating surveys is a crucial function, as most users prefer to build upon previous surveys rather than starting from scratch. However, during user interviews, one participant mentioned being unaware of this feature and reported creating surveys from scratch every time. Similarly, the “Preview Survey” and “Import Responses” options were not easily accessible. The latter was particularly confusing, as “Import Responses” referred to importing data rather than survey responses, and would have been more accurately named “Import Data.”
2. Key Features Hidden in Dropdown Menus
3. Non-Intuitive and Complicated Tagging Features
The tagging feature, an integral part of Mythos, was highly complicated and unintuitive. Users could create three types of survey tags, but only the conditional tags were clearly accessible. Tags driven by imported data also required manual coding, which significantly increased likelihood of user errors.
4. Overwhelming Main Screen with Disorganized Flow and No Autosave
The main screen presented users with an overwhelming array of options by displaying every feature simultaneously. This cluttered interface was further complicated by a disorganized flow that did not align with the structure of an actual survey. Additionally, the platform lacked an autosave features, and users were not reminded to save their work, leading to frequent instances of lost process.
User Interviews
We conducted user interviews with 8 existing Mythos clients to understand their needs, frustrations and behaviors. These insights informed the creation of our user persona, Diligent Debbie:
Upon finalizing User Persona creation we decide to focus on these four main problems.
How might we…
Guide administrators to format their data correctly?
01
Make existing support tools more accessible?
02
Reduce users’ dependence on Mythos for survey creation?
03
Make programming jargon more understandable?
04
The Solution
By allowing users to upload their excel spreadsheet before survey development, the system can recognize inputs and provide automatic suggestions, reducing errors from the start. Real-time guidance would save time for users and reduce reliance on Mythos’ customer service, making the process more efficient and sustainable.
Design
Starting with Low-Fidelity
We began with low-fidelity wireframes and conducted usability testing to identify areas of confusion before adding more detail. Key insights included:
Moving on to Mid-Fidelity
Based on feedback from the first round of usability testing, we improved the prototypes and conducted additional testing. These tests helped refine the user experience further.
Final Prototype:
Next Steps:
Usability Tests: We would conduct more usability tests with Mythos users to get more powerful insights. We were unable to schedule usability tests with the current users during our short two week sprint and conducted usability testing with users that were not familiar with the platform. If we had more time, we would have conducted tests with existing users familiar with the current structure and complicated features of the tool since the tool is so niche.
Build a demo: We would create a demo to introduce the platform to current users/new users. These would be step by step instructions on all the features and the flow of the tool to help guide new users to the platform and existing users to transition them to the new tool.
Update the support platform: If we had more time, we would have liked to include guidance on the new flow and instruct users how to troubleshoot when they run into errors. The current help site only offers information about the features and how to set up a survey for the first time, but does not help users when they run into specific issues.