What?  Identify core, critical usability and contextual issues with a governance, risk, and compliance (GRC) product and platform. Over time, the number of anecdotes grew about product and platform issues from customers and internal subject matter experts. But it was unclear how widespread and how keenly they were felt.

 

My project's goal was to suss out the top issues that were felt broadly, see if issues differed by industry or degree of customization to the platform that was done, and make recommendations on next steps.

 

Why?  The product team knew that there were issues and wanted to clearly understand and resolve them before growing the product and platform further. 

 

Who?  I and a part-time user researcher worked with an advisory panel of product managers and subject matter experts to focus our efforts. I worked closely with the customer support (CS), professional services, and sales teams to understand past issues and get access to customers for first-hand discussions.

 

There was a diversity of business types in the customer base, from financial services to health care to insurance and more, and breadth of departments, from IT to risk to legal to HR and more. We worked with a representative sample of these business and department types. 

 

How?  I planned a series of steps to first understand issues to date, followed by a more narrowed focus on problem areas.

 

For understanding issues to date, we ramped up on product and platform knowledge to understand how customers are meant to use this and the degree to which they can customize the offerings and content. We also interviewed internal teams, such as customer support and sales, reviewed prior usability reports, and combed through the customer support issues and community forum discussions. 

 

Based on this data, I developed an interview guide for interviews with customers. We held interviews with customers to understand their goals with the product, how they use it, and where it excels and lags. I worked with CS and sales to recruit customers. I scheduled and facilitated the sessions. 

 

We also ran a user study to uncover usability issues and see what works well in using the product.

 

These findings, along with those of the other discovery activities, fed into the first report of findings to the advisory team. The team prioritized follow-on activities in line with the product roadmap. A set of 'low-hanging fruit' usability issues were prioritized for immediate development work. 

 

We conducted another round of interviews with customers on a smaller set of more focused topic areas, to dig deeper into issues that came up in the first round of interviews. 

 

We also took to the field to do contextual inquiry and face-to-face interviews with customers (business owners and end users). I developed the guide for these visits and an introductory 'how to' on contextual inquiry for the accompanying product subject matter expert (SME). It was invaluable to see what users were doing with the product, not just what they told us they were doing. The SMEs were especially awed by the experience and brought back great learnings to help address the content and feature gaps and opportunities.

 

The analysis of information from these visits and second round of interviews resulted in a final report given to the advisory and product leadership teams in which we grouped and prioritized key issues by theme and impact to the customer's operations.

 

The next steps overall were to update the product roadmap to include plans for better integrations across solutions and contents that would be more tailored to needs of solution areas.