This case study highlights how user research shaped an all-in-one solution for coaches and consultants, streamlining administrative tasks to let pros focus on their clients.
The Tools Used:
Notion.io,
Miro.com,
Productboard.com,
Respondent.io,
LinkedIn,
Hubspot.com,
Zoom,
Fathom AI,
Google Workspace.
The Team Involved:
UX Researcher,
Product Manager,
Product Designer,
Customer Success Team.
Duration
6 weeks
(December 2022-January 2023).
Insight:
Trainers primarily need LMS (Learning Management System) functionality, which the platform cannot effectively provide.
🎯 Decision:
Exclude trainers from the target audience, avoid marketing to them, and deprioritize product changes requested by trainers. This allowed the team to focus efforts on segments that align with the platform’s core value proposition.
Insight 1:
Coaches and consultants need the ability to create flexible client engagements with organized materials.
🎯 Decision:
Consolidate the Programs and Packages features to create a new Engagement feature. This functionality enables professionals to organize materials and sessions in a chronological flow and track progress for both themselves and their clients.
Insight 2:
Scheduling is cumbersome and represents the platform’s primary use case.
🎯 Decision:
Prioritize upgrading the scheduling experience to make it seamless and efficient for both roles.
Insight 3:
Both coaches and clients need visibility into service delivery progress (e.g., sessions remaining, material covered, or time left).
🎯 Decision:
Introduce progress visualization for both professionals and their clients.
Insight 4:
Many coaches and consultants want quantifiable insights into their performance.
🎯 Decision:
Develop an intuitive reporting feature to help professionals track and analyze their results.
The design team used research insights to begin developing functionality tailored to the needs of coaches and consultants. The goal was to ensure a seamless flow of service delivery that directly addressed the core requirements of the refined ICP.
Below, I highlight the key questions addressed during this project and how I tackled them to achieve the research goal.
Initially, this project aimed to uncover potential unique value propositions for our customers, but we needed to specify the goal of the project and understand the research questions we needed to answer to accomplish this goal.
Firstly, I discussed the purpose of the research with both the Product Manager and the Customer Success (CS) team to gain insights into customer challenges. After that, I developed an initial hypothesis:
"Coaches, trainers, and consultants struggle to solve all their problems using the current functionality of Profi.io, as the platform doesn’t provide a flexible way to build services."
Through further collaboration with the Product Manager, we refined the hypothesis to:
Refined hypothesis:
"The current platform functionality limits coaches, trainers, and consultants from building flexible services due to package and program restrictions."
Secondly, In close partnership with the Product Manager and CS team, I outlined the research goals and formulated key research questions. After preparing and sharing an initial list with the Product Manager, we collaboratively refined and finalized it to ensure all perspectives were considered before moving forward with the research.
Goal:
This project aims to map the service delivery process for coaches, trainers, and consultants, and validate our assumptions about core narratives: target audience (TA), value proposition, strategic differentiation, the problem we are solving, and the business model.
Research Questions:
- What is the main pain point we’re solving for our market?
- What is the value proposition we’re offering our market?
- What can be our strategic differentiation?
- What is the native service delivery process for coaches? What are their biggest pain points?
- What is the native service delivery process for consultants? What are their biggest pain points?
- What is the native service delivery process for trainers? What are their biggest pain points?
When I joined the team, a competitive audit had already been conducted, revealing a diverse landscape of platforms, each with its unique strengths. Despite their advantages, we noticed that many customers were transitioning from these competitors to Profi in search of something different. So, what were our customers truly seeking?
To navigate this uncertainty and uncover our Unique Value Proposition, I realized we needed to maximize our limited resources. In close collaboration with the Product Manager, I selected three key research methods to gain comprehensive insights into the user experience:
Through this methodical approach, we gained the clarity we needed to refine the understanding of our users and, ultimately, to shape the future of our platform.
It was crucial for us to determine our Ideal Customer Persona to be more focused on whom we can bring the most value.
That's why we needed to carefully select the research participants to ensure the results of the study are as representative as possible.
The primary users of the Profi platform at the time were mostly coaches, consultants, and occasionally trainers. To gain a comprehensive understanding of their native processes, I chose to interview:
Interesting fact:
The users of Profi platform are not only our direct customers. They are also clients of our customers. So my goal was to get the information from both sides to understand the issue from different perspectives.
Other criteria for research participants
I utilized the following platforms as our main sources for respondents and for each platform, I slightly adjusted the recruitment strategy based on its unique characteristics:
To acknowledge their time and contributions, each participant was offered an incentive for their involvement in the study.
Screener survey
To recruit professionals who met the established criteria, I created a screener survey to identify suitable participants.
I used Google forms for respondents from Linkedin, Facebook groups and my personal network. On Respondent.io, I utilized their native tool for creating the screener survey.
To ensure our interviews were structured and effective, I embarked on a thorough preparation process that involved several key steps. Below, there are slides presenting all the documentation I prepared prior to conducting the interviews.
These are the main rules I followed to make sure the interviews run smoothly
To uncover patterns and commonalities, I created an affinity map by visually grouping pain points of coaches, trainers and consultants as well as observations into themed categories. This approach helped me identify the most pressing and recurring issues faced by these professionals.
By analyzing the workflows of coaches, trainers, and consultants, I mapped out the typical service delivery processes for each role in the form of diagrams. These visualizations provided a clear understanding of how these professionals operate. I then integrated the pain points identified in the affinity diagram into these processes, creating a cohesive view of challenges within their workflows.
In collaboration with the Product Manager, we developed a comprehensive master process map. This map consolidated all service delivery steps, user actions, and the corresponding pain points into a single, unified view. We enriched this map with user stories covering every step of the process.
Finally, we overlaid the master process map onto Profi.io’s current functionality. This exercise allowed us to pinpoint gaps and strengths in the platform’s features, highlighting areas for improvement and potential opportunities to enhance the user experience.
Effective communication is key to ensuring research insights drive impactful decisions. I utilized multiple strategies to share findings with cross-functional teams, tailored to their specific needs.
I organized collaborative sessions to walk the team through the comprehensive service delivery process map.
These sessions focused on:
When presenting insights to stakeholders, I adhered to a few key principles to ensure clarity and engagement
For the development team, I focused on translating insights into actionable steps by:
Sharing insights didn’t stop at presentations. I immersed myself in co-design sessions, championing the user’s voice at every stage of the process. I provided evidence from user interviews to support design decisions and worked closely with designers and product managers to craft thoughtful, user-centered solutions. My focus was always on keeping the user at the heart of every discussion, guiding the team toward decisions that directly addressed pain points and elevated the overall experience.
Sharing research insights through a presentation is a great first step, but it doesn’t guarantee everyone on the team will retain the details or fully grasp the findings. Ensuring easy and ongoing access to research data is essential to keeping the team aligned and informed. Here are the key principles I follow to achieve this:
THis project required a lot of problem solving on the go and here are some of the challenges I and the team overcame to achieve exceptional results.
Challenge:
While using Respondent.io, I encountered a challenge with the accuracy of the screener survey responses. Some participants overstated their qualifications, particularly regarding the number of clients they managed (e.g., claiming to have more than 5 clients when they only had 1 or were still in the early stages of client acquisition).
🎯 To address this, I conducted a brief pre-interview chat with each potential respondent to verify their qualifications before officially inviting them to participate in the study. This extra step ensured that we recruited participants who truly met the criteria, providing more reliable and valuable insights for the project.
I knew that another option was to adjust the screener survey questions, but since this issue occurred only on Respondent.io, and I wanted to maintain consistency across all platforms, I opted for this additional step specifically for Respondent.io.
Challenge 1:
Not everyone on the team was fully aware of the fundamental principles researchers should follow during interviews. This resulted in a few issues in maintaining the conversation flow.
🎯 To address this, I organized a brief 10-minute prep session before each interview. During these sessions, we reviewed the main questions, discussed any relevant background information about the participant, and aligned on our common objectives.
🎯 I also took the time to remind the team of essential interviewing rules: avoiding product promotion, steering clear of leading questions, asking open-ended questions whenever possible, and encouraging observation over speaking.
Challenge 2:
Participants faced difficulty explaining all the steps of their service delivery process without losing focus on the sequence of steps. Often, they would recall specific challenges unrelated to the overall process, which risked derailing the conversation. With only 60 minutes for the interview, maintaining focus was critical.
🎯 To assist the conversation and to help us all stay focused on the goal of the interview, I prepared a Miro board which i used during the interview to illustrate the process they were describing. (I would share the screen and draw the schema of their process delivery as they spoke) THis insured that all the steps were mentioned and put in the correct order. It was then also easier to map the pain points to each step illustrated on the schema.
