Leading a Research Study

 In the summer of 2017, I worked with the very talented Design team at Broadsoft Design (now Cisco) to create unique digital experiences for UC One, Cable Onda, and Intellinote. 

Duration: 3 months | Role: Design Intern | Team: Broadsoft Design Team

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What purpose did the research study serve?

UC One is a communications platform used by all internal employees and ~40% of our customers' teams internally.  I conducted an in-depth research analysis of the UC One product. I provided a final report that was presented to the CEO and used as part of a global product redesign.

The Goal

The goal of the research study was to provide recommendations for improvement and aid in a redesign of the solution.

Research Methodology

I met with several internal users to conduct interviews on the current pain points of the product. We also mapped out core user needs and expectations of the product. 

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Competitive Analysis 

As a first step to redesigning onboarding, I carried out a competitive analysis of Webex, Jabber, Skype, and Spark to build a profile of common features and functionalities. This revealed several insights into the strengths and weaknesses of UC One. 

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Heuristic Evaluation

To help unlock key differentiators, I highlighted key usability issues across the existing features in the platform and built a presentation with callouts highlighting the nature of the issue and the severity of user experience failures. 
 
 

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Contextual Inquiry

Using the findings from competitive analysis and heuristic analysis, we created a semi-structured set of questions. These questions helped obtain information about their context of use, as observed and questioned while they work in their own environments. 
 

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Task Analysis 

Task analysis is performed by observing end-users in action to understand in detail how they perform their tasks and achieve their intended goals on UC One. It was visualized this way for easy access to insights. 
 

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Experience Map

As part of the effort to present the findings to the product teams, the results from the interviews, and analysis were pooled together into experience maps to show the journey of the end-users while experiencing a UC one services.

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Results 

I helped create the final report that was presented to the CEO and used as part of a global product redesign. We also shared the report with the development team working on the redesign to enable faster recognition of core issues with the product. 

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Reflections

Learnings

In this project, I was able to use several User Research methodologies to understand customer needs and pain points, creates flows to address them, identify issues and solve them via prioritization. 

Takeaways

It was a formative experience and my biggest takeaways were how to conduct good interviews without leading users and also collaborate with others on creating experience and journey maps.