User Research in Action
Improving Skill Tracking with No-Code Solutions
When we set out to launch an upgraded skills tool for our professional services we were faced with a problem. The experience didn’t feel like an upgrade. Regardless of how it worked on the backend, the value it would bring to different parts of the organization, and the flexibility it ultimately gave our users the flow of the tool created a huge barrier in adoption.
Unfortunately, we had limited developer resources to address this and a non-negotiable launch date, which left us asking the question —
How could we make the biggest impact for the user?
Enter Walkme - a digital adoption platform that provides overlay assistance to user throughout a complicated workflow. We leveraged Walkme to tackle two specific pain points for our users.
Adding New Skills
To add a new skill the tool asked users to select ‘Skill or Certification’ and then click two additional buttons to change to a custom view that would show them the skills available to add to their profile. During testing we found that it was unclear to users where to begin this workflow. The button itself had no CTA and was simply a label of what the user would find on the resulting page.
Our UX Solution: Using Walkme’s ability to add labels and highlight a button we added text to describe the action users would need to take to add a new skill and highlight the button they would need to click. On the following page we added an additional button with the CTA ‘Add New Skill’ that would perform the clicks required to open the custom view on behalf of the user.
This resulted in a click reduction for the user, clarity in the workflow itself, and introduced simplicity to assist in the adoption of this new tool.
We solicited feedback on this change from the participants of our original pilot and the results were overwhelmingly positive. The clarity we introduced convinced even our staunchest hold-outs that this new tool would be a success.
Submitting Skills for Approval
Our skill ratings required manager sign off which means the users must first save the skills to their profile and then submit them to their manager. To do this in the tool users would need to select all of their skills, hit save, then repeat the process and hit submit. This caused users to think they had submitted their skills when they had only saved them and to attempt to submit skills that had not yet been saved to their profile, resulting in an error.
Our UX Solution: Working within the capabilities of Walkme we created a new button ‘Save & Submit’. This button performed both the submit and save workflows on behalf of the user. We also chose to move this to the top of the page to align with the additional Walkme updates and make it clear to the user that they can still use the save and submit functions independently.
This resulted in another click reduction for the user, but more importantly resulted in more users successfully saving and submitting their skills.
This was measured by looking at the average number of skills added by users in the pilot and the average by the testing group after the changes had been implemented.
Before Introducing Walkme
The original design, while functional, had a large learning curve for users and did not inspire confidence in a full team release.
After Implementation
With the updates users were then able to quickly identify the actions they needed to take to complete the required workflow.
Through tackling this UX problem head-on, we created ease, clarity, and confidence for users - reducing the adoption barrier and building excitement for the wider release across the professional services team.
