Towards a Digital User Research Tool

A Digital Workflow of User Research for Software Companies

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Abstract

The assignment that is of issue in this graduation project elaborates on Shipright. Shipright is a digital tool meant to be used to capture insights for customer research purposes. It offers a workflow to collaboratively process and analyze feedback, in order to find insights about customers’ experiences with software products and possible directions to improve product design. Shipright is meant to be used by scale-up SaaS companies to conduct user research on their products’ users. SaaS (software as a service) is a software licensing and delivery model in which software is licensed on a subscription basis and is centrally hosted. The targeted SaaS companies are the small and medium businesses (SMBs = up to 100FTE / up until 10M revenue) and Mid-Market Businesses (100 – 500 FTE / 10M – 100M revenue). For outreach, though, the minimum of company size is set on 10 FTE. This allows start-ups to be included as a secondary target group. Among this target group, user research is defined as the collection of user feedback and the analysis of it to get to actionable tasks. All the actions that goes around product decisions, revolves around product teams with typical key members of Product Managers / Owners, UX-researchers, designers and developers. The problem encountered is that, though rich insights from user research is desired, the fast-paced environment of scale-up companies prevents them from being able to spend enough time and attention on user research. Shipright’s original design is able to help scale-up SaaS companies to collect and organize feedback data from their products’ users, and to turn these data into insights. But, users do not seem to fully understand the different steps to follow throughout this analytical process. Besides that, team collaboration is not supported yet.