A Case for User Research and Synthesis

What happens to user segmentation when scaling, and how might we capture our understanding in a way that can be validated and improved upon over time?

The Setting and the Scene

Routine tasks within the WebPT product ecosystem required users to perpetually log in and out of several WebPT applications to complete their work.

But which applications, and which users? More importantly, did we understand the impact of this inefficiency on our fellow colleagues? And then: how do we use our understanding of their experience to make their lives better?

It became clear that we needed to understand and validate mental models across nebulously defined user roles and personas. Just as an occupational therapist would not have the same pain points as a medical billing specialist; an administrator at the family doctor's office, has different priorities from the patient in pain checking in at the front desk.

The Players and the Game

The challenge was clearly a cross-functional conundrum. Product Design needed to understand our users through a lens of market segmentation and vastly different workflow priorities. Engineering needed to understand our users to maximize behavior-driven development. Product Marketing needed to validate specific user personas with accurate data from real users so that they could reach new verticals.

Extracting Insight from Outcomes

Who is using the software, why are they using the software, and what do they care most about? Using tools and plugins, we were able to capture this data in a form and export it for analysis.

User interviews, anyone? The goal of this step was to capture and validate basic qualitative aspects of the human using our software. This included behavioral / personality traits using DiSC methodology as well as capturing the routine workflows that this usertype cared most about completing.

• The resulting User Persona artifacts were validated with users actually using our software. This understanding fueled the creation of external-facing artifacts for our org, as well as internal personas that lived inside Aha! platform.

• Our team easily linked these to features, giving stakeholders the ability to understand and empathize with end-users within the constraints of their unique and complex daily workflows.

We found that there was an entire segment of users that were never considered when building our original platform. These users were c-level executives and technology directors at enterprise companies, with purchasing power and decision-making authority.

• As a direct result, we were able to climb upmarket. Product Design could visualize and empathize with specificity to create solutions that made our colleagues happier. Engineering was able to understand who they were building solutions for, and how those differentiated with different user priorities. And Product Marketing was able to target this new vertical with laser-precision, which lead to the eventual acquisition of a competing software system targeting enterprise users.