User Research in Action:
Improving Skill Tracking with No-Code Solutions
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.
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.
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
The original design, while functional, had a large learning curve for users and did not inspire confidence in a full team release.
After
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.
Guided by Research:
Applying UX Research Principles to Maximize User Value
Our team was tasked with creating a dashboard visualizing the health of our professional services business. This will be leveraged by our executive team to make both short and long term decisions on policies governing our teams’ time. We decided we needed more information to create the most value and leaned on UX research principles to guide us in creating the best possible user experience.
Our first step was interviewing stakeholders to define their needs and understand how they intended to leverage this dashboard in their decision making process. We found that these users cared about quick wins and the ability to see a high-level snapshot of their teams.
From our interviews we learned that we had two main user personas to create - our executive team who is making policy changes/updates and our operations teams who manage those policy changes and the affected populations. While we would prioritize the needs of our executive team in determining the metrics and levers to include we would prioritize our operations team when it came to usability testing - as they would be the primary users navigating and saving dashboard views on behalf of the executive team.
Now we turned our attention to the user experience itself. What would users see when they accessed the dashboard? How would this information be presented and how do we prevent overwhelming the user with needless details. For each persona we created a user journey map to address these questions before beginning to build the dashboard.
The most important aspect to this dashboard was ensuring the metrics we were showcasing resonated with both the health of the business and the way policy decisions are being made. To verify we were pulling out the most important details we performed A/B testing with those in our executive user persona. The results gave us confidence that we were creating something useful and necessary for the user and business.
Finally, prior to a full launch we performed usability testing with emphasis on the technical usability of the dashboard and the ability for our operations team to access details required to take policy action. What we found was that while executive personas were taking snapshots of the dashboard at a particular time the operations teams were more often digging into the user-level detail exports to take further action. By testing with both personas we were able to address specific feedback around data load times, navigating to user exports and applying additional filters.
Dashboard Launch
The final result contains the results of our A/B testing — Metric Options A. These resonated the most with both personas and provided clarity to our teams on how the business measures and evaluates success within Professional Services. We landed on a single-pane view that could be used as a snapshot in quarterly business reviews by our executive leadership. We wanted this dashboard to be useful at a high-level and allow operations teams to follow up and take further action quickly.
By prioritizing UX research methodologies in our dashboard design process we created a product that fit our audiences’ needs. We provided value to both the user and the business by surfacing quick wins — making quicker, well-informed policy decisions happen more quickly.