User Research for New Software Feature Discovery

Overview 🔎

An IT software company was considering launching a new feature for a cloud service IT professionals use to manage clients’ computers remotely. The team wanted to validate the feature request, explore possible unmet needs from customers and include the right functionalities in the next update for customer satisfaction.

They contacted us to plan and run a user interview study, report our findings and create the wireframes along with the user flow of the feature before committing a limited development budget to the project.

Deliverables we've done 📦

• Information Architecture
• User Interviews
• Research Analysis
• User Flows
• Lo-Fi Wireframes
• Research Report Presentation

Process 🛣

We started with research planning. We created a research outline to define research goals, methods and success metrics and a timeline of the research. The plan was for a 7-week delivery period where we would conduct participant recruitment, facilitate user interviews and analyse the results to create a presentation report for the product managers and researchers within their team.

We started by reviewing the previous research materials their in-house researchers gathered and prepared the research questions and topics we wanted to discuss during the user interviews. As we started participant recruitment, we created outreach messages to possible interviewees, follow-up emails and consent forms for audio/video recordings.

We facilitated a minimum of 30-minute conversations with real customers of the software product and gathered audio recordings & research notes and discussed their expectations, how they use the current product, their day-to-day job experience and the environment they work to discover their unmet needs, understand how the new feature can improve their current workflow and possible opportunities that might be explored in later studies.

After the data-gathering process, we started analysing and categorising the data at hand through user research tools. We prepared a presentation deck to share our findings with the stakeholders and shared our insights during a playback session. Next step was using these insights to create user flows and wireframes for the feature they now want to build.

We analysed the current navigation and user flows of their software to streamline the process and designed wireframes to help their development teams. We used simple lo-fi wireframes since their development scope only allowed for building the feature with their current UI framework. We shared the final design files along with user interview templates we created for their teams to facilitate future projects with ease.



User research presentation we provided at the end of our research process

Core research findings and insights from user interviews

Recommendations and additional findings provided with the presentation

Wireflows proposed as a result of our research

Low-fidelity wireframes for quickly iterating a the new feature