Channel exports

Turning a support-heavy bottleneck into a self-service flow

My roleProduct Designer - User research, Prototyping, UI Design, Usability testing

TeamEngineering, PM, Product Analyst

ImpactRaised export self-service from 58% to 82% and cut setup support tickets by 34%, for a step every customer has to complete

Product Overview

Productsup is an enterprise product content syndication platform. Customers upload, structure, and enrich their product data, then push it out to the channels where they sell and advertise.

Context

Exports is a required step, every customer passes through it to push product data to the channels where they sell. But it was the most-touched, least-loved area in the product: 1,489 channels in one endless alphabetical list, no guidance, no way to tell what mattered. New users couldn’t finish setup without support jumping in. One line that summed it up: “I don’t know what I should do and why.”

The old cluttered list of exports

What I changed

Blank exports finally visible

The most-used export templates - blank exports, promoted to the top instead of buried.

Search & filters that scale

Find a known channel in two clicks. The #1 driver of “can’t find channel” tickets, gone.

Industry-aware catalog that scales

The list of exports now adapts to the customer’s industry rather than showing everyone the same static catalog. And labels the channels their peers actually use as “Popular”.

Multi-select setup

Customers can now select multiple exports at once. The research made clear: they want to add everything relevant in one pass, then configure each channel later.

The redesigned, guided export catalog

Impact

-34%

Reduced channel setup support tickets

58% → 82%

Increased self-service rate

+22%

Channels added per account

-40%

Reduced time to first export

How I got there

Discover → Define → Develop → Deliver Interviews + Heap data + ticket history → validated wireframes through a 13-person unmoderated and 3-person moderated test → pixel-perfect handoff on our design system.

Discover

Secondary research: Utilise existing knowledge

Primary research: first detected issues

Conduct interviews with customers and relevant internal stakeholders

Define

Analyse the data obtained

Open card sorting to cluster the channel categories

Develop

Unmoderated usability tests - 13 participants

Moderated usability tests - 3 participants (Customer Success, Integrations & Implementation sessions)

The hard part

Moving features to where they belonged

Some settings lived in Exports for historical reasons but conceptually belonged elsewhere (like product-data column settings). The hard part wasn’t moving them, it was doing it without disorienting the users.

Ideal vs. feasible

Some parts of the system were too old to change the way research wanted. A lot of the work was teaming up with engineering to find designs that gave users most of the value without needing a full rebuild.

No owner for the legacy channels

Years of export channels, and the people who built them had left. So finding the truly dead ones without breaking a client still quietly using them meant checking account by account.

One flow, very different users

than force everyone down the same path, I built a searchable, filterable catalog so each user finds what they need their own way, flexible enough for future use cases too.