Creating a user-centered platform strategy for a complex analytic platform

My role

UX Lead - Drove project deliverables, generative research interviews, and strategy workshops with directional support from lead PMs.

Shortly after joining APT, I embarked on the largest generative UX research project in the companies 20 year history. The lead product managers at the time knew that there were large opportunities to improve the platform and were looking for a cross-product assessment of current issues, as well as a corresponding strategy.

Goal

Demonstrate the potential of a UX customer journey map, identify opportunities for improvement, and build a comprehensive product strategy.

Insight

The platform consisted of many analytic tools built at various times leading to a sub-par customer and client support experience. We hypothesized that there were significant opportunities for improvement.

Solution

Q: How do you begin to make sense of a 20 year old, continuously evolving flagship analytic product?

A: talk to everyone, and make an extremely large map.

As with most journey map activities, the first step is to zoom out and understand the big picture and extract phases. In the first handful of interviews with stakeholders I discovered for the first time the truly gargantuan scope and ambition of this project.

Not only did the company have an extensive sales process, but we also had an entire supporting consulting business split across regions and industries, and an extremely complex product with hundreds of pages, and upwards of 50 'apps' running it all. Later this would manifest as a macro journey map covering whole phases, and a micro journey map assessing the flagship component of the flagship product.

I used to joke that in order to understand our features a designer needed a working knowledge of design, statistics, business analytics, industry subject matter, and experimental methodology.

Over the course of the discovery phase I developed initial personas, and made extensive maps of the chaos to better understand how users navigated the various components of the platform.


Trust, but verify

With a hazy picture of the platform forming, we embarked on a series of follow up interviews to flesh out the various cartoons of user behavior and start to focus in on opportunity areas.

An extensive survey of our consultants added even more detail to the picture. For the most part this was the first time that our nascent product organization systematically collected generative insights from the consultant organization - no minor task.

Identifying and illustrating opportunities

Now sitting on what would prove to be the largest pile of post it notes I had ever consumed in my career, It was beyond time to start driving to opportunities.

To isolate opportunities we conduced a series of workshops, referenced themes from interview notes, and transformed our mountain of insights, objectives, observations, and pain points into concrete proposals.

Some techniques we used:

  • Refining opportunities and blue sky ideas from discovery interviews

  • Sorting moments by type to understand common themes

  • Condensing similar objectives

  • Flipping negative moments into positive moments

  • Promoting positive moments

Our opportunities at this point were a little too granular to be useful, so we further refined them with dependency trees (which objectives or behaviors support each other?) Meta analysis of themes.

Coming from a background where I produced concepts to inspire executives, I also took a moment to create concept interfaces which demonstrated the top opportunities. Ultimately they proved extremely valuable later on.

Turning opportunities into a tangible strategy

It's one thing to say to a group of technology leaders, "we should really build this extremely expensive, but fantastic sounding enhancement" but in our experience it's more effective to present a coherent set of opportunity areas, prioritized by impact, and weighted for feasibility and cost.

In the end we identified 4 key areas; and further illustrated a cohesive vision by mapping out an implied ideal state from our research.

Our ideal product was:

  • Intuitive and had contagious value

  • Included features designed for user learning

  • Helps users get to better data driven decisions

And our top opportunities of

  • Improving training

  • Adding best practices

  • Reducing time to insights

  • And tracking and showing value

Our opportunities neatly lined up to our target outcomes of reducing support cost, increasing value to clients, and increasing retention.

To top off the journey map and strategy we embedded some of our more illuminating research quotes.

Impact

The resulting journey maps, system maps, and strategies had a lasting impact on product priorities, however only a few of the 16 recommendations were immediately prioritized at the time.

Despite the lack of immediate momentum, the focus areas were revived over the next 3 years and supported broad improvements to product usability, and a coordinated onboarding effort, a new design system, product overhauls, and cross functional collaborations (to name a few).

The resulting 33 foot long map also had a satisfying theatrical effect when printed and rolled along the hallway.