Reducing User Taskload
Helping Prospective Clients Navigate the Product Demo Process
Company
C3 Softworks - Minneapolis MN
Timeframe
2 months (April - June, 2018)
Team
Paul Bloedorn - Product Manager
Mike Pettman - Lead Developer
Background
In early 2018 I became the Product Manager at C3 Softworks, a B2B Saas company located in Minneapolis MN. The flagship product was the C3 Cloud, a web platform that turns corporate training material into interactive games. Clients use our platform to build and deliver training games. C3's games are very effective in live classroom settings: players use phones to join the game and enter answers, competing in teams to "win". Games encourage learning and increase test scores. Additionally, the sales team used the platform in their day to day flow to check in on clients' usage and accounts.
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The specific emotions that drove our prospects to buy (or run)
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The power of personas to communicate client influences
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How to capture and communicate a client journey
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How to choose the most impactful projects
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How to innovate when faced with endless urgencies
Things I didn't know before this project:
Picking the right problem
In my 4 years in sales and client support, I'd worked closely with hundreds of C3's clients, giving me a front row seat to the joys and pains our clients experienced. Mike and I were excited to work together and deliver more value and a better experience for our stakeholders. We had a long list of wanted product improvements, and a serious backlog of bugs, but with Mike being the only full-time staff developer, bandwidth was limited.
While Mike and I were brainstorming the best way to get started, something a senior salesman said popped into my head:
No one ever just calls us and says 'I want to buy your stuff.'
-Paul Keller, C3 Softworks Sales
What were we missing?
We offered a "free trial" of our platform where trainers could build and test a game, AND to get their contact info so sales could reach out to them. What Paul was getting at was that unless the sales team got in contact with a prospect, and coached them during the trial process, prospects wouldn't make it to the point where they felt comfortable buying the product.
Going deeper
While I was selling the product I had walked along with many clients as they figured out if our training games were a good fit for their specific training situations. I had played our games and used our system, and to me it was obvious that our games would be a great fit: people like to play games, games encourage learners to engage, and engagement facilitates learning. Done deal, right?
“I need to know that your games will work for MY students."
-Katie, Client Persona
"I need to know that your games will work for MY students." - I'd heard prospects say something similar to that many times, yet I never knew the actual feelings and motivations behind those words. Before I could advocate for our users, I needed to know much more about them.
Understanding our users: Corporate Trainers
Luckily I knew many clients on a first name basis, and by the end of that week I had had discovery conversations with 5 of them. From my notes I created the "Janet the Trainer" persona to communicate my new understandings of the what it was like to live a day as a corporate trainer. This was my first persona I had used at C3, a skill I had just learned in CareerFoundry UX bootcamp.
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My first persona at C3:
"Janet the Trainer"
...and our internal users: The Sales team
In addition to our clients, our sales team used the platform all day long, so they too were "users" who's needs we considered. The question became "How might we improve the lives of the internal users AND the external users at the same time?" I knew the challenges I faced when I was on the sales team, but in reality, that was 2 almost years ago - I didn't want to project my experience over the thoughts and feelings of today's team. So I sat down and talked with them, and created C3's second Persona, "Kevin the salesman".
A sales persona helped me avoid projecting my experience as truth.
Hmmm, we're getting warmer!
In my talks with the sales team, it became obvious how frustrating it was for them to waste time on anything that took them away from connecting and communicating with prospects. For instance, they spent a good chunk of their time helping existing customers learn how to use the product, so if we could make it easier for clients to get started, we could move the sales team toward an "improved state" where they had more time to spend with prospects.
How might we improve the lives of the INTERNAL and EXTERNAL users at the same time?
A lucky break
As luck would have it, I received an email from a client who needed help setting up a game for a live training event. She was testing a game, and the game was not allowing learners to join. She had entered her platform username and password into the PING system, a system that connected all the student to the game:
The"PING" settings modal
The sales staff normally pre-configured the PING system for the clients, yet the configuration settings were still visible to clients. This led us to hypothesize that:
Hypothesis:
If we automate the PING account creation process
then prospects will have a higher chance of having a successful test session
because it will be easier to configure game settings for a classroom setting
and free up time for sales
because they will spend less time teaching prospects how to use the product.
Validating the Problem
At this point, our team had neither the budget nor the buy-in to conduct a usability study on our existing products and systems. So Mike and I decided to try some guerrilla testing with the resources we had - our wonderful spouses. They fit the "prospect" profile perfectly, as they 1) were new to the product, and 2) had pulses. (And, of course, were VERY smart and VERY beautiful).
Our test had one objective: Configure a C3 game for an in-person training session, where players submit their answers with their phones.
“I don't want to do this anymore."
- Usability Test Participant
During the test, after hitting multiple dead ends, Participant 1 said, "I'm frustrated. I don't want to do this anymore." Participant 2 stuck with it longer, digging through multiple user guides she had found. The results? Our wives had 2 masters degrees, and 0 successful completions.
That was enough proof for us - problem verified. Looking back, I diagramed the task flow:
The "frustrating" flow:
Brainstorming for a solution
Our test exposed the PING account setup step as a usability catastrophe for those unfamiliar with the process. The PING system was an add-on to the original game, allowing students to connect to the game with their own phone. Up to that point, if the trainer wanted to capture responses from each student, they had to purchase proprietary keypads for each of the students. The PING system made it possible for the students to connect to the game using their phone's browser.
Problem was that I had no idea how the PING system worked. I hoped that Mike, who started with C3 earlier that year, could dig in an gather some insigts. I couldn't have hoped for a better result:
Me: Did you have a chance to look at the PING system?
Mike: Yes.
Me: Can you just automate the whole account creation step?
Mike: (pauses...) Yes.
Me: How long might that take?
Mike: (pauses...) Maybe a day.
Boom. If this worked, it sure seemed like it would foster both improved states.
(P.S. Mike, If I didn't express my undying gratitude at that point, my bad. I am forever grateful for how you waded neck-deep into technical debt and engineered paths through problems like Steph Curry through double-teams. CLUTCH, my friend.)
The Impact
From conversations with the sales team, I knew that while doing product demos with prospects, they ran an example game while the prospect played along with their phone. Then they opened the game's "builder" showing prospects how to build a game and how to choose the "PING" response system.
If prospects could remember to select PING in the Response Settings they could navigate the process successfully. Here's a diagram of the improved task flow:
The Improved flow:
Concerning the sales team, I didn't have a direct way to measure the impact of this specific change, but anecdotal feedback from the sales team was unanimously positive. And in my experience, when an entire sales team agrees on anything, it's a win.
“When an entire sales team agrees on anything, it's a win."
-Me
Project Debrief
In hindsight, this project's impact rippled much wider than its original scope. The perspective Mike and I gained helped set the tone for our overall strategic roadmap, one that, for the first time, addressed the technical debt that had built up from system "add-ons" over the years.
Although this first project substantially improved the usability of the PING system, we ended up entirely rebuilding C3's flagship game platform later that year, replacing the PING system with an integrated SoapClient that connected players to the host game.
Additionally, the dividends of "social capital" Mike and I received were invaluable, and helped us forward the idea that for our organization to be sustainable in the long-term, we must consistently devote a portion of our energy toward innovation, or the limitless pile of "urgent tasks" will win ;)
Thanks for reading this :) You can learn a little more about me here.
-PB