Research: Survey, User interviews, Data queries
Redefining “active users” for Hootsuite Analytics
I helped the Analytics team understand the range of analytics ability among their active users to shape plans for the “One Analytics UX” initiative.
The challenge
Research triggers included:
A rapidly expanding analytics offering, including lots of new ideas as well as existing solutions such as an external API, curated dashboards, and third-party integrations.
A spectrum of assumed and observed use cases among users from past research and ad hoc customer interviews
The team wanted to know what was valuable for our current and target users? Together, we arrived at a plan to understand users across Analytics as well as identify their goals, tasks, and context.
The approach
A kick-off with stakeholders across product, design, and engineering leadership to understand their goals and what they want to learn.
Arriving at a shared understanding on “active analytics users” so that we’re recruiting the right people.
One-hour remote interviews with a show-and-tell component where we observed how participants’ work through analyses tasks they identified as key.
A “roadshow” synthesis of interview notes to engage a team distributed in cities in Canada, the US, and Romania.
Impact
We learned that most (80%) participants were more alike than we had hypothesized.
Through interviews and observations, I saw strong patterns that people do analysis but not in the way the team expected, working outside of the feature areas that the Analytics team owned.
In the end, I worked together with the team to draw out opportunities to bring “the numbers” to users in ways they’re more likely to expect which will make Hootsuite (and “analytics”) more valuable to a wider range of people.
I also kickstarted ideation with the design team by outlining user’s top tasks and pain points into journeys.