Summary
As a Product Manager intern at QRA Corp, a tech start-up, I led the discovery and research of an in-product release notification, due to users not knowing when or how to update the product. Through journey mapping and customer support analysis, I uncovered the key opportunity areas for QRA in this area, leading to designing a “What’s New” page within the Help Centre. This decreased the number of steps users must go through to update by having it within the product.
Background
QRA Corp is a start-up software company that has developed one product, QVscribe, which analyzes requirements to provide feedback to ensure requirements are well-written and error-free. QVscribe can be downloaded as a Chrome extension, as well as a plug-in for Microsoft Word or Excel. “In-product” refers to users accessing information or settings while using QVscribe in any of these locations.
The team I worked with consisted of:
- Product manager (me)
- Head of Product
- Lead Designer
- Head of Engineering
Project Goals
This project was to design a solution that would alert users of new releases directly within the product. The objective of this project was to design a feature that will:
1
Be easy for users to locate and access
2
Be non-invasive and will not impede the workflow of existing core capabilities
3
Increase the rate of adoption of future features by making users aware of their presence.
Methodology
I used three methods that led me to the proposed solution:
Customer support analysis: the CS team recorded every meeting with customers on Dovetail, so I could analyze for pain points where users would benefit from this feature
Journey Mapping: to analyze the current use workflow and identify pain points and areas to improve
Conducting Research and Analysis
From my deep dive through customer calls on Dovetail, I found several insights that show confusion over what the latest update is, such as the following:
- users not knowing about an update
- users not being on the latest version
- users asking how to find information on recent updates
- users asking what will be in the next release
Next, I developed a workflow diagram in Miro to analyze the current workflow of how users receive information about new releases.
Takaways
I discovered that once users view the version of QVscribe they are currently using, they have no way to immediately know if that’s the latest version and that the main way for users to learn about recent releases was to leave the QVscribe product and go to the QRA Corp web page, which is inefficient and disruptive.
Identified Opportunities
Based on the analysis, I used an Opportunity-Solution Tree (OST) to connect the desired outcome to the opportunities and the solutions. The desired outcome was for users to be able to quickly access release updates to write quality requirements documentation. This would be achieved by the two opportunities identified:
1
Updating to the latest release should be a quick and seamless process
2
Communication with users about releases should be non-disruptive
User Testing
After presenting the OST to the team, the lead designer created two functional prototypes that were tested internally with six employees to determine which option met the opportunities and desire outcome best. Additionally, we took the feedback we received to judge the solution.
During the user testing, I asked the following questions:
- Can you walk me through how you would find information on the latest release?
- Can you show me how you would find the newest feature after reading about the release?
- Which of the two prototypes did you like more?
Outcome
Through collaboration with Engineering and the Head of Product, the final solution we decided on was a “What’s New” page within the Help Centre with the following features:
A summary of the latest release indicating new features and resolved defects
A preview of key new features
A link to download the release if it wasn’t the current version being used
Impact
I analyzed the new user workflow, which showed that it does decrease both the mental and physical steps a user must take:
