Revelation® is a start-up company that offers a rich internet application called PROJECT. Revelation PROJECT is used by Market Researchers and Design Researchers to conduct immersive, qualitative research studies that help answer clients’ business questions. Using PROJECT, Researchers arrange online activities such as daily diaries, photo essays, questionnaires, and other creative stimuli for study participants to provide a view into their lives and thoughts. Faced with usability issues as well as performance problems, Revelation engaged with Devise in order to meet three key project goals:
1) Define customer needs and conceive innovative solutions for PROJECT v2 that would be feasible and scalable.
2) Work quickly and efficiently to meet an aggressive target release date.
3) Integrate interaction design with their Agile XP development process.
This 40-day project with Devise involved User Research, Product Conception and Detailed Design plus support services. Read more for the full story….
Meeting Customer Needs with Innovative Solutions
The Devise team began with User Research involving in-person interviews and observation time as well as telephone interviews and use of PROJECT itself. These activities quickly led to an understanding of Researchers’ key behaviors and needs along with the main concerns and motivations of study participants and research clients. Devise created a set of personas to capture and model these customer insights. The Researcher personas particularly revealed usage patterns that allowed Revelation stakeholders to focus PROJECT v2 development on the most valuable business opportunities.
The Devise team proceeded to define an innovative interaction framework using a scenario-based approach to design. During rapid concept testing of the framework, Revelation customers and potential users strongly validated the product design. As delivered, the PROJECT v2 solutions accommodate existing features and incorporate a wide range of workflow improvements based on customer needs and interaction design best practices.
These mockups compare Revelation’s previous version with PROJECT v2:
The Dashboard home page is more action-oriented to better help Researchers moderate activities and analyze data. Study set-up is streamlined. The Devise team also defined a powerful way for Researchers to moderate and interact with Participants’ responses using natural-language statements such as: “Show me what’s new” or “Show me all responses tagged with…” or “Show me all responses from this participant…”. This intuitive approach offers unprecedented flexibility and ease of use for managing research data.
Additionally, the inclusion of multiple analysis tools allows both Researchers and their clients to approach participants’ responses from many different angles. Researchers and clients can simply star responses, and/or add notes, and/or define tags, and/or dynamically build up finding sets around any theme or idea. Improving collaboration between Researchers and their clients was an important opportunity area, and the simpler analysis tools let clients get involved without any training overhead. Ensuring that the system remembers who analyzed which responses also facilitates teamwork.
Delivering Quickly
Before engaging with Devise, Revelation had established an aggressive deadline for marketing the launch of PROJECT v2 at a major global conference. Also, their investors were watching closely to see whether the company could meet stated deadlines. On top of this, the existing application was exhibiting problems with performance and reliability due to its success, so new research study sales were suspended until the release of PROJECT v2. All these factors put tremendous pressure on the project team to work at optimal speed. Only four weeks after first engaging with Devise the Revelation development team began coding the core features of the new system, and the first release of PROJECT v2 was launched about six weeks later.
Integrating with XP Methodology
The Revelation development team employs a set of Extreme Programming (XP) Agile methodologies, including the planning game and one-week iterations. Regular review meetings between the Devise team, development team and business stakeholders during the User Research and Product Conception phases established ongoing agreement about the scope of the PROJECT v2 release. Because the interaction design framework was coherently envisioned before implementation began in earnest, the entire team understood the big picture and agreed upon the right set of functionality during release planning.
As the development ramped up, the primary personas’ usage scenarios were leveraged as Agile story cards for iteration planning, ensuring that customers needs remained the center of attention. Documenting the persona set and the usage scenarios also allowed the many new developers who were added to the PROJECT v2 team to get up to speed quickly on Revelation customers’ needs and goals.
During each week of the Detailed Design phase, the interaction design team delivered high-fidelity mockups and key path scenarios for the features scheduled in that iteration. Participating in weekly stand-up meetings and having close daily collaboration ensured that any outstanding issues were identified promptly. Weekly acceptance testing involving the interaction design team also helped keep features true to customer needs and ensure that any bugs were prioritized appropriately.
Summary
Devise delivered on all of Revelation’s project goals. Most significantly, PROJECT v2 has received extensive positive feedback from existing customers, and Revelation has received attention as a start-up that’s ready for the big league. The depth of design work delivered by Devise during this engagement also provided Revelation with many additional months of progressive enhancements that will allow them to continually improve their user experience.
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