Discovery and validation that generates insights

Research
|
Censys
|
2022

OVERVIEW

A new competitor forced us to suddenly need to build bespoke tools to suit a water mitigation workflow that had, before now, largely been ignored in the product.

THE CUSTOMER

Contractors whose job was to remove water from a property so that repair work could begin.

STRATEGY

I convinced the Product Manager we needed to understand the process the customer was going through in the first place. This led to a series of discovery interviews that I wrote the interview scripts for, facilitated the discussion, and synthesized the results into meaningful data.

HIGHLIGHT

I let the customer tell us what was important to them. In particular was the need for adjusters to return to a property every day to take moisture readings from their equipment. This renewed urgency on an initiative to partner with dehumidifier manufacturers to supply that information over WiFi. Not only would this make their jobs easier, it would reduce the conflict between adjuster and carrier and keep things out of courtrooms.

Some sample questions I asked were:

  1. How often do you deal with water mitigation?
  2. What does a typical water mitigation claim look like?
  3. Can you walk us through the last water mitigation project you had?
  4. What tools do you use to handle water mitigation claims and how are they used?
  5. What is typically the smoothest part of that workflow?
  6. What is typically the most frustrating part of that workflow?

RESULTS

  • Tighter team integration and alignment on what really mattered
  • Increased customer trust and collaboration
  • Data-driven insights that affected the direction of Customer Portal purchase decisions



Discovery - Customer Portal Research and the Power of Small Wins

OVERVIEW

Many enterprise solutions are based off of technology that is 30 years old. At Xactware, I was in the position to support our Billing and Account Management team replace our draconian billing structure with a friendly self-service Customer Portal that we would purchase from a third party, then customize to our systems.

THE CUSTOMER

Anyone in charge of the billing for third party vendors. This could be anyone from a Project Manager to a CFO.

STRATEGY

Meeting with the Product Manager, we decided that our whole team needed to understand the pain points of our current system thoroughly before choosing a potential solution. This meant team members shadowing account managers (those in charge of billing) and interviewing our customers on their billing contexts.

HIGHLIGHT

After meeting with one particularly frustrated customer who couldn’t “wait for years” for a new billing system, I met with the team who built our current tools to add a small quality of life feature, export to .csv for our invoices. After discussing it with their lead developer, product manager, and the Billing and Account Management product manager, we were able to plan it for the team’s next sprint. This would show the customer that we are taking their feedback seriously while not investing too much extra time and resources into a system that would be replaced within a year. This was an excellent example of the quick value adds that are so plentiful when we are engrossed in our customers’ contexts.

RESULTS

  • Tighter team integration and alignment on what really mattered
  • Increased customer trust and collaboration
  • Data-driven insights that affected the direction of Customer Portal purchase decisions





Prototype Validation - Form Builder

OVERVIEW

The evolution of our prototype that I sent out to the team to mark the occasion of wrapping up the testing on the base interaction set.
The evolution of our prototype that I sent out to the team to mark the occasion of wrapping up the testing on the base interaction set.

Our customers have been able to build basic forms for a while, but we wanted them to have the necessary tools to create more than just data-entry forms, but full logic information gathering machines. We wanted something so powerful that it could theoretically replace all of our estimating tools.

THE CUSTOMER

Administrators who would be creating the process for the adjusters to go through while on site.

STRATEGY

I took a strong focus on our basic interactions to try and build a solid base of delightful interactions and a strong information architecture. If that could be refined and solidified, the more complicated logical expressions would be able to be built on top much more easily. This would mean rapid prototyping and iterating on designs. It wouldn’t be enough to take some easy wins, we would need to radically change the interaction patterns to create the desired base. This would lead to a tight cycle of iterating and validating multiple versions within just a few weeks, restricted only by the schedules of those we were recruiting for our tests.

HIGHLIGHTS

I was surprised with how much research increased the trust of the team towards design as a whole. Seeing this process deliver so much value so quickly, it became routine for all team members to attend instead of just the one or two developer representatives that product would ask for. It became something that was looked forward to instead of tolerated.

RESULTS

  • Increased team collaboration and unity
  • Increased task success rate
  • Decreased time required to complete tasks
  • Decreased turnaround time for customer requests on custom forms