Outcomes: I streamlined the Discovery process, developed a design discovery matrix, enhanced our research toolkit, and ensured company-wide alignment for efficient resource allocation. Additionally, I improved our customer feedback loop with an in-product survey tool for post-release insights.
Reviewing the Discovery Process
To address this challenge, I led an initiative to review and refine our Discovery process. The goal was to build a scalable research approach that aligned with our agile methodology without sacrificing the quality of our insights.
I reached out to our Agile Coach to facilitate a workshop with primary stakeholders. We documented the entire Discovery process from start to finish, identifying complexities and misalignments. We clarified key roles and responsibilities, streamlining the research documentation process to be more scalable and focused. As the Design Lead, I am responsible for both research and design, I took additional steps to ensure the new process was efficient and effective.
Design Discovery Matrix
It's important to recognise that different projects have varying levels of complexity and unknowns, and therefore require different amounts of time and resources. To address this, I developed a design discovery matrix that helps our design team determine the right amount of learning, designing, and usability testing needed for each project. This ensures that we can efficiently allocate our resources and provide the best possible results for our farmers.
These guidelines are flexible. Not every project will fit into these categories or follow the same formula. I first shared this chart and the different levels of the process with the design team. As a team, we started jotting down our design discovery research toolkit. We realised that every problem requires different research tools, and we all contributed to our toolbox. By doing this, we were able to get more creative and change up our research methods.
I also developed a Figma Template to standardise the initial steps in understanding farmers' problems. I updated the discovery process and informed the Product Owners about their areas of accountability.
I regularly meet with our Head of Product and Product Owners to ensure that I am informed about upcoming work. This helps me plan my team's time effectively, making sure that the projects are aligned with our strengths and that the designers have enough capacity and headspace to succeed. For larger projects, I work with another designer to tackle complex research, and for smaller projects, I work upfront to scope and assign the work to a designer to work on alone.
Planning the product design capacity
The value we are ready to deliver to our farmers uncovered in Discovery - a new metric for success
Company-wide Update
During our Seasonal Planning, I updated the entire company on our discovery matrix and highlighted areas where design needed support, particularly given the faster pace of work from the scrum teams.
Currently, I am working on a process to incorporate Dev Mode into the Scrum Teams' workloads to reduce the time spent on Design Sign-Off for the Designer and Developer involved. We have seen a significant decrease in time needed from the designers on every Jira ticket completed with Dev Mode so far.
Building on our Releases
In my Lead Product Design role, I describe my four main responsibilities as wearing hats:
1. Looking Ahead: develop a high-level vision for our design work and stay informed with industry trends and competitors to keep the team updated.
2. Discovering: emphasis with our customers by understanding their problems, gathering input from internal staff and customers, designing solutions, and iteratively testing them until they address the customer's needs.
3. Design Support: ensure that designs are correctly implemented, providing quality assurance and user experience advice while working with the Scrum Team.
4. Building on Releases: evaluate the effectiveness of product releases, document customer feedback, and incorporate important insights back into our discovery process.
Building on releases is often neglected due to the lack of a structured process for obtaining and reviewing feedback. Seeing an opportunity to add value and improve collaboration, I started investigating our current methods of gathering customer feedback.
Our product designers' hats we wear throughout our work cycle.
All internal stakeholders involved in this company-wide process change.
Understanding Current Customer Feedback
I with key roles to gain an understanding of our current process and documentation: Customer Support Team Lead, Head of Customer Ops, Senior Marketing, and Product Owners.
We use MixPanel to track user engagement within our applications, which gives us an overview of usage patterns. However, this data alone does not help us to understand our customers' motivations and needs. Our Customer Support representatives document all enhancement requests when they communicate with farmers who provide feedback on our applications. However, only 8.5% of these customers are calling about our mobile app, and they are mostly Farm Owners/Managers.
As a result, we do not currently receive feedback from our Stock Managers, Worker, third-party access roles, or users on the mobile app. Given that our mobile app is our flagship application, it's crucial to gather, review, and implement customer feedback to ensure the success of our mobile app.
Our customers' enhancement requests mostly come from Farm Owners/Managers and web users.
We excelled at tracking our usage data, but we lacked ongoing qualitative feedback.
The Solution
I proposed using an in-product survey tool to gather immediate, actionable feedback post-feature release. This would provide both quantitative and qualitative data without costly one-on-one interviews. After researching and evaluating tools, I secured provisional budget approval for Survicate, pending successful trials.
This was created as part of my Women & Leadership: Leading Edge 6-month course.
The Survicate Trail was a Huge Success
Our trial with Survicate was a huge success. We conducted two surveys on our website application, achieving nearly 80% completion rates and improved NPS responses. Feedback on specific features, like the Diary/calendar, was invaluable for upcoming projects.
When testing our mobile app, we triggered surveys on the most commonly used recordings to see if offline capability affected response rates. It didn't. About two-thirds of our customers, who record activities in service, received our surveys. We had a 75% completion rate with an average Customer Satisfaction Score (CAST) of 80% for the recording experience!
Highlight of some customer feedback we have gathered in the application has helped us quickly improve our releases.
We also received many useful suggestions for improving mob move and animal health treatment recordings. These surveys are crucial for getting feedback from Workers, who are the hardest to reach with phone calls or one-on-one interviews.
We also tested email surveys to beta-test features, finding them effective and more economical than our current Survey Monkey subscription. Moving forward, Survicate will be integral to our discovery process, providing quick, quantitative feedback to validate designs and hypotheses.
Improving our Measures of Success
Including CSAT surveys in our after-release process, has allowed us to measure our success not only by increased usage data but also by how our customers feel about the experience. The feedback we receive allows us to build on our releases and prioritise our roadmap.
By enhancing our releases we are building trust with our customers and can easily track our company's progress on our long-term goals.
Results
We successfully improved our Discovery process, developed a design discovery matrix, enhanced our research toolkit, and ensured company-wide alignment. Additionally, we established an effective feedback loop with in-product surveys, resulting in actionable insights and better design validation. At FarmIQ, we have proven that limited resources don't have to eliminate research; it just requires us to be smarter and more strategic about how we gather and apply our insights.
Work completed whilst at FarmIQ