Increasing access to education research

Case study is high level and specific details are revised to protect client confidentiality.

TOOLKIT Design Research, Digital Design, Design Strategy, Client Relationship Management

TEAM Business Associate, Design Director, Product Expert, Technical Expert, Technical Associate

MY ROLE Led the research for three (out five) priority segments from scoping to synthesis, co-created strategic objectives, created and user tested prototypes, created assets shown

 

Challenge

My team was tasked with ‘modernizing’ the customer experience at an organization that helps increase access to and use of education research. The client had a breadth of customers and a lack of shared vision among the organization’s employees on the priority customers. In addition, the organization had many inefficient, legacy systems and ways of working. 

 

Process

High-level process, not as linear as it appears here

 

UNDERSTANDING THE CUSTOMER AND PROBLEM SPACE

Illustrative ecosystem landscape

SEGMENTING AND PRIORITIZING CUSTOMERS

Because there were competing opinions on the target customer, we invested heavily in gathering research and synthesizing in a quantifiable way to inform the prioritization more objectively. I conducted secondary research in scholarly journals to inform the qualitative interviews. Collectively, the team conducted thirty clients, fifteen expert, and fifty- five customers interviews, about half of which I led. The high number of qualitative interviews was due to regulatory constraints on collecting survey or diary studies.

I led sessions to help categorize the over twenty roles into five segments and prioritized those five categories based on the client’s ability to impact and the feasibility of the relationship.

PERSONAS & JOURNEY MAPPING

I used personas to contextualize research priorities to help the client understand where to focus efforts. The client needed a better grasp on how education research, the focus of their organization, played a role in their customers lives. For example, the ‘10% time spent on research activities’ in Theo’s persona compared to the 90% spent by Mateo helps the client understand the end-customers’ capacity to consume research. Similarly, the indicator on preferences between ‘raw data’ versus ‘actionable insights’ helped the client understand mediums and channels to target these customers.

For the five segments, I wanted to understand both the known education research pain points and the unknown. Where did these customers have challenges that evidence-based practices could solve? Since education priorities are often set over several years and executed in one school year, I mapped the journey of each of the segments over twelve months or more. I included their experience related to our research as well as general pain points in cases where there were unknown opportunities.

CUSTOMER INSIGHTS

Insights varied from strategic to tactical implementation details. An insight coming out of this state group segment - states do not have enough content around the tactical implementation of a program. Instead, the research they typically encountered focused on the new and novel versus making already proven methods work for their unique classroom or school context. As a result, it might be high leverage to enhance research incentives that focus on practical application and implementation as well as making the existing research on practical application more visible. 

Personas and journeys were also created for the other four segments. I generated a set of insights for each segment and we compared those against each other to look for opportunity areas.

 

TECHNOLOGY, DESIGN, AND BUSINESS INSIGHTS

Example of overlapping painpoints across internal teams and customers

To create a more holistic picture with the insights, I worked closely with our technical team to align the client’s technology and resources analysis with the pain points I was uncovering with customers.  This allowed us to consider customer, business, and technical needs. For example, we conducted a cost savings analysis to help prioritize the suggested changes.




 

CONCEPTS AND FUTURE STATE VISION

With extensive research and analysis in hand,  I generated a set of concepts for my priority areas to review and test. l led approximately thirty concept test interviews, ten expert interviews, and a workshop session with each of the client’s regional groups. The concepts testing helped surface themes across all segments.

Takeaways: 1) Make the website experience flexible to accommodate the wide variety of customers and use cases 2) Help employees spend more time on customer service instead of administrative work

Summarized customer feedback on website:

  • Navigation by role versus topic was split depending on customer type

  • Saving information is critical to decreasing resource demands (e.g., reducing the number of calls)

  • Newsletters are highly important to a subset of customers and their workflow

Implications for website feature set:

  • Navigation on the homepage emphasizes topics over roles yet allows users to select multiple roles

  • Sign-in is prompted as needed (for example, if they want to save datasets) and is accomplished with social sign-in. Users who sign in have additional options to share content

  • Newsletters are an option but no longer a primary feature

Future State Journeys were created for all five segments to illustrate the end state to the client and also help to show concepts in context. Knowing how often and at what stages concepts were used would help with the prioritization and road mapping, the ultimate output of this project.

 

PROTOTYPING AND PRIORITIZING CONCEPTS

One of the key recommendations coming out of the customer insights and technology combined analysis was that the organization needed centralized data to provide new levels of access to users and simplify maintenance. This recommendation both accounted for the organization's technological maturity and end-customer needs. 

To put that recommendation into practice, I designed a website anchored on a dynamic layout based on user preferences, meaning the client could focus on the content that populates the website instead of the layout itself. For example, the default publications and datasets would change automatically based on time of year, active projects, and user preferences for authenticated users.

 

I tested the prototypes with customers across segments. Overall, the prototypes solved end-customer’s needs and challenges and, with a few changes, were ready for additional testing.

 

ROADMAPPING

Finally, the team created a roadmap that included the prototypes for priority concepts. To understand the effort required to implement, all user-facing concepts were broken into features and assessed for user impact, technical complexity, and cost. A build-versus-buy analysis called out concepts where the client could potentially purchase an off-the-shelf solution rather than undertaking a custom build.

 

Key takeaways

Organizational makeup, technology, and design are a trifecta. The end solution was an elegant combination that demonstrated an understanding of the client’s organizational structure and priorities, technological capabilities, and the end-customers’ needs. This trifecta was made possible by the cross-functional team. 

Get ahead of the research in regulated industries. Despite having experience in regulated industries, I still did not have ample time to conduct customer research via surveys, diary studies, and other desired methods because of the additional approval requirements mandated by this client. That research could have helped us reduce the number of qualitative interviews significantly.