Case Studies

The Situation

I was engaged to investigate, analyze, and evaluate the aims of customers for a company specializing in online-recruiting, news, and market research for the energy industry. The company’s web presence had proliferated into nine separate sites containing a wide variety of online products. They wanted to consolidate and simplify their web presence and devise a product roadmap to guide their design and IT department for the next several years.

They agreed with me that their new product-roadmap had to be founded on a sound understanding of the opportunities available to satisfy the inadequately-met aims of their present and future customers. At the same time, it had to continue to meet their short-term business plans and anticipate new categories of competition, such as LinkedIn.

What I Did

I interviewed all senior executives and departmental heads for their understanding of who their customers were or might be in the future, and I reviewed all existing market research. I defined a scheme to categorize their types of customer and identified the aims for each category, considering in particular the true aims that the company’s products and services were really wanted for.

I performed a quantitative analysis of their customer and billing database to identify the most populous and highest-revenue-generating customer categories. Top categories included VC’s in the green energy industry, solar power engineers, and wind turbine manufacturers. There were a half-dozen such categories. From each group, the company helped me select two or three representative customers and invite them to participate in telephone interviews. Most accepted, and I went on to interview each and elicited a coherent set of relevant data:

1. What key aims in their own jobs led them to use the company’s online services
2. How important each aim was to the customer
3. How frequently did they need to achieve each aim
4. What tools and resources they used or knew of to help them achieve each aim
5. How they used them (e.g., at work, on the go, etc.)
6. How satisfied they were with the resources available; why and why not
7. Ideas they had for better tools and resources that could help them.

I evaluated how well those aims were being met relative to online competitors and other alternatives (such as offline recruitment search services). I then evaluated the business opportunities to the company that were represented by these unsatisfied aims, considering factors like cost and risk of developing products to meet them, marketability, sellability, and ROI to the company from such products.

Results

Finally, I facilitated a decision-analysis process to decide with the management team which user aims to address. This formed the basis and roadmap for all subsequent innovation and design work and guided the decision-making throughout the rest of the project, clearly and objectively.

In subsequent services, I went on to invent product concepts to capitalize on each business opportunity and satisfy the selected user aims, leading to a product roadmap stretching over several years. I then designed new functionality and content for the website, and managed the rest of the development process for the project. The revised website was a huge success. The company attributed its success, in large measure, to this initial step have been done so well.

The Situation

A mobile-telecommunications company wanted to develop a collection of consumer mobile-software-products for their new line of smart phones to help draw customers away from their competitors. Time-to-market was a critical factor, because many of the company’s competitors were rushing to market with similar types of product.

The company knew that its key areas of strength were that of a telcom (engineering, security, and reliability), but that it had a history of trouble developing consumer software products. They also knew how difficult it was for a large organization such as themselves to collaborate across departmental boundaries, and avoid the limitations of departmental perspectives.

Therefore, although their staff was very expert in the technological aspects of mobile products, they needed a nimble partner to come up with innovative product-concepts and lead a team through a sound, efficient process that would lead to a range of concepts that satisfied all important business criteria. We were engaged to provide the methodology, information and communication expertise, creativity, and management needed for success.

What We Did

We began by assembling a project team of company experts from the various departments that had something to contribute and a stake in the outcome. We facilitated sessions to brainstorm, analyze, assess, and prioritize ideas, as we led the team through the steps of my product-innovation process.

An analysis of the company’s market research showed that the key category of customers for the new product would be young business professionals. We interviewed such people, mined customer-support databases, interviewed retail salespeople, and surveyed publications to identify user aims that might be addressed by smart phone products of interest to them. Key aims included the following:

• To access and view files from work while on the go.
• To anticipate slow traffic on route to work, in time to compensate.
• To monitor bank balances.
• To read voice-mail, rather than having to listen to it.
• To do e-mail on the smart phone.
• To check weather forecasts.

Next, we identified online and offline alternatives available to such customers to accomplish these aims. They included the following:

• Using appropriate applications available from competitors.
• Calling up a colleague and asking them to retrieve and e-mail a file to you.
• Listening to the morning traffic report.
• Logging into individual banking sites on your desktop.
• Getting someone to transcribe your voice-mail by hand.
• Using a third-party e-mail phone application.
• Subscribing to weather alerts by e-mail from the local TV station.

On a scale of 0 to 10, we scored how easily and effectively customers could accomplish each aim using any or all of these alternatives.

Next, we excluded aims that were of low importance, urgency, or frequency for these customers, plus those a new product could not help customers achieve as easily or effectively as the alternatives: e-mail on the phone and checking the weather. Finally, by reconsidering the remaining aims against my criteria, we postponed all but monitoring bank balances, because the other aims would be far more complex, difficult, and time-consuming to meet.

This defined the customer aims the company was willing and able to offer to meet, that could be addressed by a smart phone better than the competition or other alternatives. They were, therefore, the most important aims to develop product-concepts for.

We facilitated creative design sessions with the project team to brainstorm concepts for a product/application to enable customers to monitor their bank balances on their smart phones. We took into account required functionality, platform, user expertise, languages, and customizability.

We mocked up and provided descriptions of the three best concepts: a mobile-accessible website, an application running on the smart phone, a text-messaging service provided by the company to allow customers to query their banks securely. For each concept, we assessed how well it would accomplish customers’ aims and its benefits for customers.

We looked for competing products, but found none. Although none of the product-concepts put up a high barrier to future competition, and although any of them could be superceded by future competitors, these drawbacks were not serious to the company at this time.

Drawing on what we had learned so far in the process and my information-quality maps and skills, I wrote marketing materials for each product-concept. These were assessed with the team’s marketing representative to determine the marketability and sellability of each product-concept. Similarly, the team assessed the sellability of each product-concept, considering its quality, target customers, pricing, and accessibility.

The team estimated the costs (including buy versus build options), time, technical feasibility, and risks of developing, marketing, selling, and supporting each product-concept.

The last factor to be considered was benefits to the company. I estimated each product-concept’s sales revenue, market share, and effect on company reputation and sales of other company products.

Finally, I provided decision-analysis and support to help the company evaluate the concepts and choose the best one, considering all the factors evaluated above.

Results

The company chose the first product-concept (online bank-balance monitoring). I was engaged to fully design the product, which was programmed by the company’s IT department. It became quite a success. They later developed products for the other aims, which they had postponed in this first project.

The Situation

A financial-services company wanted to make one of the products on its website, a B2B credit-card- payment application, more competitive. But before the company could start specifying how to enhance their product, they needed to be sure how well the current product was performing and obtain an accurate assessment of its strengths and weaknesses versus the competition. They also wanted to have a range of possible enhancements, so that they could select the ones that would produce the most satisfaction for their customers, and therefore the greatest increase in direct and indirect benefits for their company.

What I Did

Preliminaries

I assembled a project team of representatives from each of the departments who had a stake in enhancing this product. I then conducted weekly meetings of this team to collaborate on the various steps in my process. I began by gathering information about the key characteristics of the present product.

Business Benefits

After a preliminary analysis of the product and the market research studies that had been done about it over the years, I researched the current product’s sales revenue, market share, influence on other company products, contribution to the company’s reputation, and ease and cost of marketing, selling, and supporting it.

Some of these scores were quite low, and the company was clear about what levels of improvement were possible. These included becoming at least the 3rd best product in the market, increasing sales by 20%, reducing support costs by 30%, and winning at least three enterprise clients within the first year after re-launch.

Customer Aims

Next, I investigated how well the current product was satisfying its customers. I researched the categories of customers whose aims the product might address. For example, small businesses, medium-sized businesses, and enterprise corporations, and within those segments, I identified business owners, company financial controllers, accountants, sales staff, customer service, and IT system integrators. I identified the customer aims of each type of customer. These concerned matters such as authorizing and processing online payments, reconciling payments, processing refunds, and minimizing fraudulent payments. In collaboration with the company’s staff, I prioritized these aims relative to corporate strategy.

Then, on a scale of 0-10, I evaluated how well the current product helped customers accomplish each aim. Taken together, these scores showed how well the product was satisfying its customers. It was decided that there were ample opportunities for improving customer satisfaction by improving and enhancing the product to do a better job of helping users achieve a number of their aims.

Competitors

Next, I evaluated how well its five leading competitors helped customers achieve these same aims. I found that the company’s product scored a 4 (tied for last), while the best competitor scored an 8. This validated the company’s suspicions that its product was not at all competitive. I also identified significant customer aims that the competition was not addressing at all.

Concept Innovation

I began by reconsidering the key characteristics that an enhanced product should possess, in the light of the research I did up to this point. I realized that it would be best to retire several major functions that the present product included: a product catalog and a shopping cart. In addition, I steered the company away from trying to add functionality to integrate the product with customers’ back-office functions.

I then created mockups of three concepts for an enhanced product, making use of the latest Rich- Internet-Application techniques to help customers accomplish some of their aims much more easily and effectively than any of the competition. For each concept, I developed assessments of its business benefits, customer satisfaction, marketability, sellability, competitive advantages, costs to the company, time to develop, and technical feasibility. Finally, I provided decision-analysis tools and support to help the company select the best concept to enhance its product.

Results

The result was a concept for an enhanced product that both competed well and achieved most of the business benefits desired by upper management. The company went on to engage me to provide detailed functional specifications, UI, prototype, and visual design. The final product was programmed by their IT department and became highly successful.

The Situation

A ski resort company engaged an ad agency to redesign their website to sell all their vacation-services online. The project was to take three months, but after three months it was obvious that they had a long way to go. In addition, the project was already over budget, and the design was completely unacceptable to the company. It was incomplete, confusing, and lacked functionality to make signing up for vacation activities convenient, thereby squandering sales opportunities. I was called in to diagnose the problems and take whatever action was needed to get the project back on track.

What I Did

I discovered that the main cause of their problems was woefully inadequate specifications. There was no informational and functional blueprint (sometimes called the conceptual design or requirements) and no UI design. They had gone from a vague idea of the website straight to visual design and coding. Neither the company nor the project team could tell whether any part of the site was correct, because there were no clear, specific blueprints or UI design to evaluate it against. This led to continual revisions and rework.

As I began to work with the company on a proper specification for the site, it was agreed that no one was really clear about the exact business benefits the site was there to produce, what all the categories of users were, or what user aims had to be met for the site to be successful. For example, many out-of-state visitors would not know the resort well and needed guidance to avoid such mistakes as booking ski rental miles away from their hotel. Yet this user category was overlooked. In short, the site was not yet ready to be designed.

I quickly executed the necessary portions of my User Research, Digital Product Strategy, and Concept Innovation services to correctly define the objectives for the site in terms of benefits to the company and satisfaction to its users. Next, I considered several possible approaches the website could take to meet its objectives and helped the company pick the best one.

Finally, I was in a position to do analysis & modeling. I worked with the executive management team and their marketing and IT departments to define the right user tasks, content, features, and structure to accomplish the site’s objectives. For example, I combined a dozen different vacation-services into an integrated, configurable, a-la-carte, online-shopping experience: hotel reservations, equipment rentals, classes, passes, tickets, gift cards, excursions, merchandise, insurance, flights, and equipment storage—a first for a resort website. Then, I produced an informational and functional blueprint that included back-end transaction modeling of the resort’s ERP systems, as well as the details needed for the next step: UI design.

Result

The entire set of services took only four weeks of intensive work. My analysis and modeling allowed the UI, visual design, and two programming teams to complete the design and coding of the website in only four months. There were no significant problems. The cost was about 30% less and the time was about half as long as would have been normal for such a project.

The Situation

A company that developed high-tech products wanted to produce an home electricity-usage monitor. It was to allow homeowners to track and forecast details of their electricity usage, plus minimize consumption by setting complex rules for their appliances in response to changes in ambient temperature and service (e.g., price spikes or brown-outs). The monitor was to be offered in two forms: a full-featured website and a wall-mounted, wireless LCD monitor with fewer features.

The company had a high-level concept and functional specifications for the two monitors. But before a visual design could be produced or coding begun, they needed a design and prototype of a user interface to demonstrate and try out their specification in concrete form. This is the best way to discover changes and improvements needed—far better than waiting to find them after costly coding and testing. It also provides details needed by the visual designers and programmers.

In addition, they were looking for investors to fund the project, but had nothing but a Power-Point presentation to demonstrate their concept. I was called in to conduct our UI Design & Prototyping service.

The two major UI challenges were a) simplifying the complex and sometimes confusing logic and terminology of rules that users could define to control their home appliances, and b) a feasible design for a UI that would work well on both a website and a custom, idiosyncratic, and very limited LCD monitor.

What I Did

I analyzed the potential and limitations of the LCD device and designed special screens to use it to the best advantage. For both monitors, I eliminated the insider jargon, resolved inconsistencies, condensed the information, and reorganized it into a coherent scheme. Then I used my advanced, online, interactive, prototyping tools to design each individual screen, define its functional specifications, and present working models for the company to try out.

I built an interactive, impressive demo in Flex that highlighted the product’s key functionality and served as a technical proof-of-concept. It was demonstrated at a national, industry trade-show, leading to a Texas energy company’s funding the project. The working prototypes greatly facilitated collaborative online review, testing, assessment against specifications, and speedy revisions. This led to a high quality UI that the whole team was extremely satisfied with.

Results

The prototype was also used in market-research and tested for ease and effectiveness of use. It scored 7 out of 10 before any revisions were made. Minor revisions brought the score up to a 9. The UI design was handed off to a visual design team, who then passed their visual design to the client’s in-house programming team. They were then able to program the application successfully. The initial product launch helped the company land $30M in funding to expand their business into the energy industry.

The Situation

A national association was in the midst of having its 2,000 page website redesigned. They were behind schedule by many months, change orders were rife, review meetings were frustrating and generated large quantities of rework, team members were in conflict with each other, morale was low, key personnel had been fired, executive confidence in the project had plummeted, and the project was in danger of being canceled.

What I Did

I was brought in to perform my Project Management & Troubleshooting service. To find out what was causing the project’s problems, we gathered information and the perspectives of team members and executive stakeholders, reviewed design documents and specifications, assessed project plans, and evaluated project controls.

I determined that the fundamental causes of the problems were the following:

• Business benefits were not clearly defined.
• User aims were poorly understood.
• The project’s objectives were neither clear nor widely supported.
• There were no detailed project-plans.
• Schedule and budget were unrealistic.
• No project management tools were being used to help track the project.
• The vendor’s skill set was limited graphics design and programming.
• Design flaws had been discovered too late in the process.
• The project team lacked effective management.

In discussions with staff, I developed solutions to these fundamental problems. To shore up the foundations of the project, I defined the project’s business benefits, user aims, and overall concept for the website. I created the missing functional and informational specifications that were needed to guide the UI, visual design, and programming steps. I facilitated meetings to re-orient the project team, repair relationships, and develop group-support and confidence. I took over the project-management function. The vendor doing visual design and coding was replaced.

Results

The final project was completed successfully under budget and on schedule.