Contextual User Study for Product Planning
UX ResearcherWorking closely with the CEO and Sales lead to conduct the onsite inquiries
~ 1 months
Achievement
User profiles, task flows, stakeholder maps, and abundant insights from the interview scripts are created and integrated into a knowledge framework that supports future product development.
Contribution
- Designed the study.
- Conducted interviews, converged, and validated data with organized documentations.
- Communicated the results with the team.
Impact
- This endeavor represented one of Umbo's initial organized user research initiatives and facilitated further research on Alarm Centers.
- Encourage the team to begin addressing the new user's impact on the product and to think from the user's perspective.
Expand with Alarm Centers
During the security trade show ISC West in 2018, we discovered that our AI service can significantly reduce the workload of Alarm Centers. The market are 10x bigger than our existing user types.
Umbo has already incorporated the 97% accuracy AI filtering and cloud management features but the user experiences are not optimized for “event monitoring”.
Product Goal → Research Goal
Intense discussions have been held regarding the go-to-market plan, debating whether to collaborate with key players in the market through AI plugins or pivot our existing cloud platform. Ultimately, we have decided to build an AI-supported Event Monitoring Platform as an MVP within our platform to test the market.
As an MVP, the product must meet Alarm Centers' core requirements for efficiently managing their daily tasks, including tools, services, personnel, and their business needs.
Product Goals - Launch an MVP to test the market
- Scale up our AI service to effectively handle a larger volume of alerts.
- Introduce a new platform that empowers Alarm Centers to efficiently manage and execute tasks associated with a substantial number of alerts.
Research Goals - Understand how Alarm Centers work
- What defines an Alarm Monitoring Center?
- What services do they offer?
- How do they deliver these services? (Tools, methodologies, organizational structure, etc.)
- What challenges and difficulties do they face?
Plan the study based on Contextual Inquiry
Why Contextual Inquiry?
- Late Stage of Discovery: We already have a rough understanding of how users might interact with the product, so a semi-structure study will be more focus.
- Comprehensiveness: Contextual Inquiry helps us collect firsthand data and observe contexts closely. Given that this might be the only study we can conduct before deploying the MVP, it's crucial that the study is comprehensive.
- Build relationship with customers: by engaging extensively with customers, this method helps us form user relationships that are valuable for future studies.
- Familiarity with the Method: I am well-versed in this method, having previously participated in publishing a HCII paper that employed it.
Prior to the study
❶ Competitor Survey
We researched and reviewed tutorial videos online for several comparable competitor monitoring platforms to summarize some commonalities and identify certain issues.This help us formulate the interview questions.
If there’s more time available...
If would be great if we can explore a wider range of platforms, like customer/resource management systems. This will help us create diverse questions and define our product's position and innovation goals.
❷ Design Interview Questions
- Date
- Business background
- Monitoring background
- Alerts operator monitoring
- Alert managements/ Quality control
- Alert priority
- Current workflow
- Receiving alerts
- Diagnose alerts
- Distribute alerts
- Park/suspend alerts for a while
- Arm/disarm
- Device status monitoring
- Search
- Authority to their customers
- Others
- Intersting Observations
- Other Requests
❸ Select Interviewees
On-site interviews can be a relatively expensive research. To ensure comprehensive coverage, our goal is to encompass all possible user types within Alarm Centers within one week. Collaborating with the sales team, we've organized interviewees into 3 key customer segments who are likely to express interest in using this product.
• Chimera Security
• Eilte Interaction
The On-site Visits
We dedicated a week to travel across the U.S., visiting both our existing customers and the interviewees. It was tiring, yet incredibly motivating to witness our designed products in active use by customers!
Traveling with the Sales and CEO provided valuable insights into their customer interactions, illustrating how designers can engage in the process, request participation, and seek input.
❶ Ask questions, observe and summarizing data during the interview
Given that it resembled a business visit without any incentive payoff for customers, I took advantage of the opportunity to observe contextual data and effortlessly weave my UX questions into our business discussions.I summarized the data during the interviews whenever possible as it often leads to new discoveries and opportunities for further exploration. To ensure accuracy, I take detailed notes immediately after the interviews, capturing and summarizing key information.
❷ Follow up calls
We conducted 5 follow-up phone calls to further review and expand upon the findings. With the draft task flow in hand, the questions during the phone interviews became clearer and more well-explained.
Outcomes
I took swift notes and continue optimizing the data during the interview. This supplied us with abundant data to construct materials like user profiles and task flows.
❶ User Profiles & Task Flows
We created some user profiles and their task flows based on the types of the personnel in the Alarm Center organization.
These showcases not only the features users need while monitoring events but also the decisions, challenges, and stakeholder relationships they encounter during the process. These provides the team with an overview of a day in Alarm Center.
❷ Stakeholder Map
The semi-structure interview helped us gather diverse and valuable data that not only guided the development of this product but also provided valuable insights for our business strategy.
It became apparent that there are different types of Alarm Centers, each offering various services and having distinct relationships with other players in the industry. This helps us understand the potential correlations and conflicts of interest that the product features might generate.
Future Work
These studies have provided us with a strong foundation to further investigate the insights of this industry. In the following years at Umbo, I took every opportunity to engage with Alarm Centers and gather contextual data.
The structured findings from this project served as a framework for accumulating this data. The database was also passed on to the subsequent product managers, who expanded it further by conducting numerous customer calls. 💓
Reflections
At Umbo, we consistently emphasize the importance of team-wide knowledge organization and alignment. This project provided us with a platform to put this into practice. Team members now feel more confident in advocating for user-centered design and have gained heightened awareness of the user needs driving each feature.
This experience revealed my aptitude for asking questions and demonstrated how I can employ it to guide the team towards insightful outcomes in research and design reviews. I'm truly grateful for the backing and confidence I received from my CEO, sales lead, design lead, and the product team. Their help was essential in making the most of my research and management skills.
What could be done better (reflections from 2022)
Although there is a significant user base that continues to use and appreciate this product, resource constraints have hindered its development since 2020. The following points highlight the challenges we have encountered:
🔥 Although we have targeted only 3 types of potential users, the scope is still too large for the development of an MVP product. The essential features that overlap are sufficient for an MVP, but as people start using it, the requirements begin to diverge based on the different workflows, cultures, and growth stages of the companies.
- Work with the sales team and CEO to assess the different user types and, if possible, prioritize targeting one of them initially.
- Allocate more resources to studying integrations, as this can provide us with additional time to develop the product while simultaneously onboarding users.
🔥 Alarm Centers' usage intentions greatly differ from our current users. Since we've chosen to create the monitoring console within our existing platform, the challenge lies in designing a user experience that caters to various user types within a unified platform, adding complexity.
- Raise the concern from both UX and development point of view while discussing the product goal.
- Mapping the user profile with the existing ones to evaluate the possible UX conflicts.