With the rapid advancements in AI, previously unattainable features have become possible. However, the hype surrounding AI has also led to conflicting opinions from internal stakeholders and an increasing number of differing customer requests.
In this context, it was crucial for our company to establish a clear vision. Significant development time had already been spent, but there was no clear line of site to a return on these investments. As a result, I was asked by leadership to join the project and conduct user research to inform the roadmap strategy. Given the urgency of the situation, I immediately took action.
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The outcome of the user research was instrumental in placing the customer voice at the forefront of decision-making and inspiring designers, engineers, product managers, and others to create a solution that meets the needs of our users. Below, I detail milestones achieved throughout this discovery process.
User Research - Example Project
When conducting user research, it's crucial to gather insights from a diverse range of users, including different personas and company sizes. To achieve this, I utilized Pendo to segment a random sample of our legislative users and reached out to them via email to request interviews.
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Understanding that user interviews can not always reach the scale of feedback needed, I also set up surveys and joined several important client calls and roundtables to collect feedback via a live poll tool with Ahaslides.
01. Conduct Outreach to Diverse Set of Users
02. Competitor Research
To develop a strategy, it was crucial to have a comprehensive of our competitors' offerings and the pricing strategies of the broader market. I created a detailed analysis of their features, communications, and other aspects, which spanned over 20 pages. Additionally, I created a table for the leadership to access, which provided a high-level overview (shown below).
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03. Conduct User Interviews
During each interview, I gave users the opportunity to share their daily routine, challenges, motivations, and other relevant information. The interviews aimed to gain insight into their overall responsibilities, beyond just product usage, in order to identify areas where AI could streamline their work and increase efficiency.
Example Questions​
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What does your daily workflow look like? ​
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What repetitive tasks do you and your team perform regularly that take a siginifcant amount of time?
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Alternative phrasing: What is a task that always seems to be on your to-do list and is tedious?​
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Are there specific tasks that you believe AI would be really good at?
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What factors would influence your decision to invest in a new AI-driven tool, beyond just the cost?
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[After evaluating a few features] If you were purchasing a new product, what would be the must-have features of the ones we have discussed, in order for you to see enough value to purchase?
04. Extract Themes and Insights
Each interview was uploaded into a research tool, Dovetail, and important quotes from the users were tagged. This made it possible to link quotes together across multiple user interviews and extract themes. To maintain focus on the discovery questions needing answered urgently, I limited tags to only ones relevant to the project - but stored away interviews in a general project folder for wider themes to be extracted. ​
05. Present Recommendation
In under a month, I was able to conduct 20+ user interviews and gain feedback via polls from over 100 other users. The conclusion of the project provided the following deliverables, and currently we are moving into the execution phase.
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Product & Monetization Strategy Recommendation Document. Including sections for:
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Summary of from user research themes
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Market trends with AI, including example strategies other companies took and either failed or succeeded
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Competitive landscape
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Recommended roadmap
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User Research Presentation​​
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Select user interviews highlighted, with a 2 minute compilation of the top insights from each interview, so stakeholders could hear feedback in our users own words​
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Organized research in Dovetail for designers to access during prototyping work
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Interested to discuss the findings further? Please don't hesitate to reach out via email!