IDUS' Success Story

How IDUS used Hubble to continuously discover ideas for product improvement
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IDUS is the largest Asian marketplace for independent creators and artists. The company is one of the fast growing e-commerce platforms in the world and it has more than 5M monthly active users and 40,000 unique sellers based in South Korea.
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IDUS's seller experience team exclusively uses Hubble to prioritize its product roadmap. Through Hubble, the team has successfully uncovered hidden usability issues and pain points experienced by sellers.

“After testing Hubble for a few weeks, our team was blown away at how easy it was to launch contextual surveys, collect responses and share & synthesize the results within our team."

^{Jaegun Lee, Lead Product Manager at IDUS}

Please introduce yourself and your role in the team
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I’m Jaegun Lee, and I am the Lead Product Manager responsible for the Seller Service at IDUS. My main responsibility in the team is designing, building and optimizing the end-to-end seller services and collaborating with our sellers to address various challenges that they face as they are trying to grow their business.

How did you collect seller feedback before introducing Hubble?
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Previously, we mostly collected seller feedback mainly through the customer service division, app reviews, and google forms. For key features, we have conducted usability tests (UT) to observe how sellers interacted with the service and identify areas in need of improvement.

What were some of the difficulties and challenges you encountered?
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The feedback received through customer support was sporadic and did not let us collect feature specific, contextual feedback. Furthermore, it was difficult to properly organize the data and prioritize our backlog. While usability tests have been helpful, we still struggled to recruit sellers and did not have the time and resources for moderated interviews.


How important is it to gather high quality user feedback during product development at IDUS?
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Since it’s founding over 10 years ago, the company has grown tremendously with over 5M monthly active users and 40,000 unique sellers. While the team has spent a lot of time and effort optimizing the buyer experience, the seller & merchant experience has been relatively less developed. Recently, to improve our seller retention and continue to improve the IDUS marketplace experience for both buyers and sellers, we decided to launch Seller Portal 2.0 which is a complete redesign of our seller experience on our platform.
While many of the initial features we released in the initial stages of Seller 2.0 were aimed to provide a better user experience, many of our sellers were not adopting the new features quickly. This made our team brainstorm a lot about gathering real-time, contextual feedback from sellers just to make sure that the features that we are releasing are actually adding value to the sellers. One particular anecdote that made us realize the importance of seller feedback was when a top-selling seller emailed us directly to check if she could revert to the previous version of the seller dashboard, citing significant delays in processing shipping information. From this incident, we realized how important it is to listen to our sellers and make sure that the product changes we are introducing are not creating any unforeseen issues or problems.

What made you evaluate Hubble as a potential solution for user feedback?
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Our CPO (Boram Chung) suggested Hubble as a solution to address ongoing challenges and identify improvements in Seller 2.0, particularly in cases where usability issues persisted. The need to efficiently collect and analyze feedback that aligned with our needs prompted us to introduce Hubble. In addition, because our team didn’t have a dedicated UX researcher for seller experiences, we wanted to adopt something that the entire team (product managers and UX designers) could use easily to gather seller-specific feedback.
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What made you guys ultimately choose Hubble?
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As I mentioned earlier, the main reason for introducing Hubble was to efficiently collect real-time seller feedback and build our product roadmap with impactful insights from sellers. After testing Hubble for a few weeks, our team was blown away at how easy it was to launch contextual surveys, collect responses and share & synthesize the results within our team.

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How have you used Hubble since adopting it?

We have been using Hubble for about 8 months now and it has become a core component of our product operations. In my team specifically, we have used Hubble actively when we start planning for potential feature improvements, focusing on the following key questions: 1. Are the issues & problems that we have identified in the past through our CS division persisting? 2. What are some hidden problems and pain points that sellers have that we have not identified yet? Hubble has been a key tool that we use to get answers to these two questions.

In my opinion, Hubble’s most valuable advantage is that it allows for a continuous feedback loop, as opposed to just helping us identify problems. After we work with engineering to release a new feature, we use Hubble to conduct satisfaction surveys to gather direct feedback and identify any problems or issues with the updates. This continuity allows us to iterate very swiftly and make product decisions based on real input from our sellers.
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Any tip or advice for companies that are looking to try out Hubble?
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In the past, our team used other surveying platforms such as google forms to gather product feedback. However, collecting feature specific data has always been a sharp pain point for me, paired with the fact that our google form response rates were not that high. Using Hubble’s in-product SDK has significantly reduced the turnaround time for feedback collection and synthesis within the seller experience team. Last but not least, the support and attention from the Hubble team has absolutely outstanding; they have always helped us like they were part of our own team. I wholeheartedly recommend Hubble for user-centric organizations that want to elevate the speed and the quality of their user feedback operations.

"The support and attention from the Hubble team has absolutely outstanding; they have always helped us like they were part of our own team."
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^{Jaegun Lee, Lead Product Manager at IDUS}