GoCanvas: Understanding Our Users

Overview
One of the issues the company faced when I came in, was a lack of deep understanding of the users of our products. Sure, we knew generally who they were (SMBs) and what they were needing to do with our software (data collection) but we had made a lot of assumptions and leaned heavily on anecdotal research, conducted by our customer support folks and sales reps. We basically lacked any real insight into their thoughts and motivations.

Dedicated research has been a fundamental part of the UX team since I joined in late 2018. Because we place a high value on understanding the user, we have a FT senior lead researcher as well as several UX team members who participate in several of our research efforts. We run these efforts in conjunction with sales and marketing and they include:

• Weekly usability testing within our product suite;
• Monthly deep customer research through our 6 month Product Advisory Committee (PAC) cohort;
• Ad-hoc remote field research including written and video diary studies;
• On-site field research with targeted industries including construction;
• Monthly and quarterly win-loss and churn surveys, interviews and analyses;  
• Continual A/B testing across all product form factors;

along with a variety of additional internal research initiatives.

These efforts have allowed us to really gain a solid understanding of our customers as well as our end users (since they are often not the same.) This knowledge has allowed us to make substantial changes in the product that have pushed us towards greater product adoption and growth in sales. Even though we’ve learned a lot, we are still continuing to ramp up our efforts and Q2 2020 will bring more deep research as well as several new initiatives as a result of our learnings.

Impact (*)
Increase in overall sales revenue of 29.8%
Admin NPS increase of 4 points
Mobile NPS increase of 3 points
Trial download increase of 8.8%
Trial to PQL increase of 23.2%

Role
Overall team & strategy lead, UX lead

Deliverables
User Personas [in-progress], Version 1.0
2019 UX Team, All-hands deck, 2019
User Journey Map, Available Off-line
Research Deep Dive HH Video
Research Deep Dive HH Analysis and Recommendations, Available Off-line

(*) as of May 2020