Feedback Sessions
Project Case Study :: Research
Case Study Overview
After a thorough investigation of the Feature Audit between the Basic and Premium Experience and the creation of Personas, it was time to start imagining the physical platform.
My approach for most projects is to create a dream-like state (meaning: go big or go home type of mentality). Experimentation is key to innovation. Something that seems hard might be plausible or creating something that wasn’t asked for could be the next big selling feature. I start ideating with sitemaps, workflows, and wireframes.
I then bring those artifacts to the tech team to get their impressions. We discuss limitations, potential roadblocks, and come to an agreement on what to show to stakeholders.
After modifying wireframes from the tech team feedback, I present them to partners and stakeholders on the project. After those deliberations, I would produce mockups to gain another round of feedback from clients and customers. This case study focuses on that process and those results.
Goals
- Come to a consensus on the features and functionality of the new Premium platform.
- Gain real user feedback and impressions on the mockups.
- Modify features and functionality based on user feedback sessions.
Timeline
- Ideation + Articfacts / 2 weeks
- Feedback Session Prep. / 1 week
- Feedback Results / 2 weeks
Terms to Remember
Customers vs Clients
- Customers are self-help users that purchase the product through our e-commerce store. They generally have no direct communication or business agreements with Gallup OR had one in the past but have chosen to downgrade.
- Clients were customers that have gone through the marketing funnel that now have a relationship with the Practice and have client contracts with Gallup. They started on the Basic platform and wanted more features and services from the Premium platform.
Basic vs Premium
- Basic refers to the self-help platform that institutions are first exposed to the product through our e-commerce store. This applies to customer users primarily.
- Premium refers to the custom centralized platform that institutions purchase through a contract. This applies only to client users.
This graph represents where clients and customers fall between our measurements of product usage. The black square (upper-right) represents where our best clients (and sometimes consumers) fall under.
The Legacy Platform :: Out with the Old
The platform had been made in the early 2010s. Over the decade it had received some feature upgrades and UI enhancements, but nothing major. It was built on a trendy framework that is not an industry standard today and wasn’t built with scale in mind.
Our biggest client was one of the first early adopters, and at this point had still been using the platform with nearly a decade of data and users within the centralized database. It now became a pain point for our most important client.
User Collection :: Our Biggest Voices
The Premium Platform is for the top-tiered users of our biggest product, the CliftonStrength product. We list it under two funnels of solutions for the Practice. It’s pitched primarily as a Student product, but can easily be repurposed as a Workplace product with or without Practice guidance.
We strategically handpicked the users to interview for this feedback session. We chose a few of our most opinionated clients currently on the Legacy platform, a few of our biggest customers on the Basic platform, while keeping in mind a variety in 2-year and 4-year colleges.
The User Feedback Sessions :: An Aha Moment
After all the research I’d done in preparation for this moment, I had uncovered most of the pain points with my own solutions – most being well received – yet there were still a few curveballs thrown.
We even uncovered new truths about why users on the Basic platforms didn’t want to upgrade to the Premium platform. Seeing the upgrades sparked a newfound interest in upgrading by the Basic platform users.
After the sessions concluded, with the help of a junior design, we put together a slide deck of the findings to present to the stakeholders. For our stakeholders, the suggested features that I fought for started to make sense to them.
Results & Outcomes
These sessions solidified more than assumptions for our team and the Education Practice. It proved the dedication of research was worth the extra time invested and showed promising results for custom-client conversions to the new platform.
Roadmap Features
We used the user feedback sessions on what features to prioritize for the MVP and beyond. Some of the harder features were critical to a lot of user excitement while some we thought were important could wait.
New Discoveries
There was one section in particular that needed a lot of improvements and it was a biggie. After major modifications to it, we went back to the users with the most critical opinions to test if it now met their needs.