B2B Integration Software User Research
Understanding the needs of integration software users
Challenge
We worked with another product design agency to redesign major features for a B2B SaaS company. This company provided integration platform solutions but needed a better understanding of how to improve their current offerings. Standard Beagle worked on the UX research, collaborating closely with the other agency as they created new wireframes based on our research.
While existing users and users familiar with integration software had no problems with the software, new users expressed how difficult the platform was to learn.
Note: Because of agreements with our partner agency, we are withholding the name of the client and not able to show delivered work.
How might we create a better experience for users who are new to the software?
Scope
Our scope included stakeholder interviews, user interviews, and user tests for concept validation. Each round of testing would come with a detailed summary, highlights, and recommendations for up to five key user flows.
Constraints
We gathered our insights from five stakeholder interviews, 15 user interviews, and five concept validation user interviews.
Implementation
Our findings were integrated with the new user path concepts, and our recommendations validated with the additional round of user interviews.
Our Goal
We first needed to understand the pain points of the different user personas, especially new users. We then needed to know what paths users most followed on the platform and how to optimize them.
Our goals included:
- Understand the pain points and frustrations for users who are new to the software.
- Find the main paths that users take, and pinpoint areas for improvement.
- Discover useful insights from user testing that would inform the redesign wireframes.
Our Solution
Create an onboarding experience that allowed users who were new to the platform to quickly adapt to proprietary systems.
Results
Our research provided the client with valuable insights into their onboarding process, what users found helpful, and what created learning hurdles for new users.
Ultimately our research provided guidance for new updates to the platform.
Our Process
Understand
We met with stakeholders to get a sense of the platform, it’s users, and where we needed to focus our efforts.
Target personas
Stakeholders identified three target personas:
- The experienced user, who is familiar with the integrations industry and has used this particular platform for over a year;
- The user who is new to the platform, but familiar with the integrations industry;
- The user who is new to both the platform and creating integrations.
User paths
Stakeholders also identified the key use cases for the platform.
- Building an integration
- Testing and setting up the integration
- Monitoring and troubleshooting errors
These steps gave us an idea of how to interview users and determine key paths along these three steps. It was decided that we would dive into these phases as key user paths.
Explore
User Interview
We interviewed 13 users- five users were experienced, four users were new to the platform but experienced with integrations, and four users were new to integrations and had started using the platform within the past year.
Lack of direction
Users recalled their first time using the platform, stating how confusing and overwhelming the start screens were. They felt there were a lot of options to choose from, but no clear idea where to start.
Insights and Opportunities
1First-time users needed more direction and guidance in order to acclimate to the platform quicker.
Templates
While users who worked on a wide variety of projects felt templates would not be helpful for quickly setting up their integrations due to the diversity of their work, users who did many of the same or similar integrations said they wished they had a way to save templates.
Insights and Opportunities
2Users who were new to the platform, or used the same style of integrations over and over, would benefit from templates. However, due to the varied nature of integrations, what could be a typical integration at one organization may not be applicable to another.
Error diagnosing
Newer users who were involved in the monitoring and error troubleshooting phase noted that not all the error messaging was helpful. Messages would tell them what went wrong but not give any indication on how to resolve the issue.
Insights and Opportunities
3Users less experienced with the platform needed more guidance on how to resolve errors quickly, rather than have them sift though both internal and external documentation and guides for a solution.
Help and documentation
When first getting used to the platform, users said they would ask a friend or colleague for help or go to Youtube for tutorials. This was after reading through the platform’s internal documentation. Users who were familiar with the industry also looked into community help boards for solutions.
Insights and Opportunities
4The platform’s internal documentation did not provide the right kind of instruction for new users, who needed a better understanding of proprietary terminology, the concepts of integrating, and deeper dives into how to solve their particular use cases.
Validation
Based on our feedback and suggestions, our partner agency redesigned the three key user paths and created a mid-fidelity prototype. We went forward and tested the new paths, this time with two less experienced users, and four experienced users.
Initial setup
Previously, users had trouble with where to start, and needed guidance on their first steps on the platform.
Insights and Opportunities
1With the new start screen, users found the options well organized and helpful. All users specifically called out the option to pick the projects they last worked on as especially useful. They wanted to see it at the top of the menus, rather than at the bottom as initially indicated in the wireframes.
Tutorials vs. screen space
During the building phase, users noted that the new guided pop-ups would be helpful to direct new users when starting with a template. However, experienced users said they did not like the popups crowding their screen space.
Insights and Opportunities
2While a guided experience would be beneficial for the first time a user set up an integration, having pop-ups appear every time they chose a template would become a frustration.
Documentation
On the documentation page, users first noted the video. They felt new users would benefit from video and text. They noted that videos were better for overviews and walkthroughs, while text was better for deeper dives into concepts.
Insights and Opportunities
3Video would be most effective for general information and walkthroughs, but documentation should still provide text.
Error diagnosis
Users found the new error diagnosis presentation useful, which included accordion panels that gave more information on a connection with an error and possible solutions. Some users mentioning that it was a better way to diagnose errors than the current method.
Insights and Opportunities
4Users value the additional guidance provided to diagnose errors, which may result in time savings.
Overall
Most users found the new screens would be helpful to new users, but experienced users were concerned about changes to the UI and how it would affect their current workflow.
Insights and Opportunities
5Experienced users would value a way to choose between a new UI and current UI, should any of these changes be implemented.