PROJECT OVERVIEW

Company.com provides businesses with a digital experience platform, containing necessary and vital products and services that one needs to run a business. Using this product not only makes completing back-end business tasks simpler, but it is all in one place, paid via one bill.

The problem

Consumers are confused/don’t know how to shop, buy, and use business service products of value to them that we offer.

The goal

Find ways to make our products easy shop, buy and use.  A key assumption  is that we will be able to do this by redesigning the current dashboard. We conducted preliminary research to identify what consumers seek when looking at services like Company.com,  the current pain points and assess the impact that redesigning the dashboard may have on user experience and workflow.

Summary

• Focusing on engagement concerns related to the Company.com dashboard

• Conducted discovery research (qualitative IDIs) with 23 current users/prospects

• Identified four key problem areas across both new / existing small businesses

• Ideated on solutions with full Dev/Marketing team - 160+ ideas generated

• Tested 3 rounds of lo-fi wireframe designs via qualitative research - 48 individuals

• Two quantitative surveys conducted for Dashboard / Products ~ 300 respondents

the problem to solve

How might we create such a compelling experience around shopping, buying and using business services for prospects and customers, that they can’t imagine living without them?

success measures

• Increase Repeat Usage ((DAU)/(MAU)) 

• Increase % of Paid Users and % of ‘More Paid’ monthly (Baseline needed)

• Increase Customer Satisfaction (NPS) from 23 to 30

• Increase Avg time on site per month from 1:50 to TBD

• New designs score 4.5+ (out of 5) on how much experience matches ‘promise’

• New designs score 4.5+ (out of 5) on understanding what we do

• New designs score 4.5+ (out of 5) on how much value the consumer perceives

the approach

Human Centered Design (HCD) supplemented with quantitative research:

• Focus on qualitative user-driven research 

• Early/frequent feedback on low-fidelity concepts / ideas

• Design / Test multiple approaches 

A key principle of HCD is to work iteratively. Make progress, test it out, and apply what we learn in the next iteration. This means that the initial stages of a product’s evolution are revisited early and often – a good thing. The feasibility of any feature, requirement, or characteristic is evaluated before significant resources are expended.

discovery phase

Research Steps

hypothesis tested

• Users trust Company.com and the services provided

• Users value the ability to launch their own web apps through a link on the dashboard

• Users prefer to see only the most relevant directories instead of all of them

• Users understand the dashboard is one place where they can see all their products

• The solution integrates the tools they’d expect in a way that delights them

• Consumers understand the DVP for offerings (free/paid)

• Consumers value the DVP for offerings

• Users can tell what vendor is providing what offering

feedback

We color coded all of the feedback into 3 groups: good, bad, and has potential. We then organized the feedback into themes to look for patterns and we converged to focus on the four biggest issues impacting goals:

design/synthesize phase

Based on the four themes that were defined from the feedback, we created statement starters or “How Might We's.” These statements defined how we approach wireframes and prototypes to test with users.

Develop phase

impact/effort matrix

We decided to do a team activity that involved the marketing and engineering team so that we could have a better understanding of not only what would be of high impact from a UX perspective, but what is feasible from a developer’s perspective. As a collective, we wrote 160+ ideas. The teams selected ‘favorites’ and ran these ideas through impact & difficulty:

high impact/low difficulty

low-fidelity user testing

Now that we had a better understanding of what would have a high impact on users and a low difficulty for the develop team, we created low-fidelity wireframes to test with users.

storyboarding

After testing the low-fidelity prototypes, we created a storyboard to visual predict and understand the user’s experience with a product and identify the needs of that user.

insights discovered

deliver phase

mid-fidelity testing

• Designed higher-fidelity prototypes of Dashboard, Interview, Business Listings and Reputation Management

• Conducted remote user testing studies with 4-6 people per design

• Converged on a design through three rounds of testing with 48 total small business owners

• Collected qualitative/quantitative (Kano) feedback on the usability and value of features and the dashboard

• Broke out work into MVP and versions

feedback

Based on feedback from the mid-fidelity test, we were able to create a list of “delighter features”, “one-dimensional features”, and “indifferent features.”

recommendations & next steps

Old Dashboard Design

new dashboard design