Continuous discovery for PlanRight
- Aug 3, 2023
- 4 min read
Updated: Oct 11, 2023
Overview
PlanRight is a scheduling and future-planning application ideal for anyone using WorkflowMax (WFM) or Xero Practice Manager (XPM) who wants the ability to schedule their staff, view capacity and make meaningful real-time resourcing decisions. With customers across a range of sectors from Accounting and Architectural to Technology and Trades, PlanRight offers a range of sync options and customisable filters meaning that almost anyone can plan right.
After 5 years, the team had to overcome the problem of high churn with what it would take to get back on track and more. My role as a lead UX UI designer/product designer was to come up with a discovery plan to use the right tools to get the necessary insights in a given budget. This case study illustrates my discovery plan as executed.
Two phases of discovery
There were two options to go with, based on an initial research:
The team of PlanRight, the workflow planning product, had an idea of a tool that could overcome the limitations of resource planning tools in the agile environment and provide visibility to blindspots in data collected from various sources. The first phase was to test if this idea was worth pursuing.
The second option was to understand the current problems in the app and create a new version with the same features.
The first phase started with a workshop to understand the business outcomes and known challenges. If the first phase failed, the plan was to pursue the second phase of discovery.
Understanding the business outcomes
I facilitated the first workshop where the agenda was to
Run the Sailboat exercise
Understand the Product vision - What are we trying to do for the customer?
List the Users + Target customers - Who decides to hire the product?
List out the Assumptions about the vision, users and opportunities
By the end of the workshop, the target users, customers, the product vision and the assumptions were all documented. The business outcome was identified as doubling the Annual Recurring Revenue (ARR) every 6-12 months.
The research plan
User research, JTBD synthesis
The Ideal customer profiles (ICPs) were first created and then some sample users were interviewed to refine them. Based on the user interviews, a synthesis of what triggers the customer to choose our product was done. This is called their Job-to-be-done (referred to as JTBD). Furthermore, more user interviews and a workshop were done to narrow down the ICPs who would hire the new product idea, and also the assumptions that needed to be tested before beginning any design of the product idea.
The assumptions were validated using more predictive research with storyboards. The results revealed that the new product idea was not safe to pursue.
The existing PlanRight customers seemed to value the current product and enhancements to it more than new fancy features
The concepts being used in the offering seemed to relate more to a different industry
Understanding the usability issues
The phase 2 of the discovery was to find out how to reduce churn and test out different solutions.
The ideal path to pursue was collaboratively decided as resolving the usability issues of the basic functionalities of the app.
The first task was to test with a few users to find out what parts of the app were not being used. Also, efforts were taken to identify the patterns in the reported support issues. A lot of interesting results were revealed by these activities.
Understanding the product
There was a lack of discoverability of features on PlanRight and either the users were not utilising the support documentation and the demo data properly or they are unaware of where to look before asking the support team for help.
Trial extensions
There were requests of trial extensions. Either their trial period was not enough for them and they were unable to spend ample amount of time in trying out the product or they had signed up for a trial in a different mode and wanted to reset their account and try another way.
Login issues
There were issues relating to login and 2factor authentication in the app. Even though this issue might seem trivial, the amount of reported support tickets and the sense of frustration in the emails were far too great to ignore.
Quantitative analysis
Churn rate analysis revealed that as much as the subscription rate increased steadily every month, the churn was also increasing in a much higher rate.
Opportunity solution tree
The above analyses provided us with a list of opportunities that could be pursued to achieve the business outcome. An Opportunity Solution Tree (OST) was used to document and track the product development thereon.
An Opportunity Solution Tree (OST) is a visual aid that helps enable the product discovery process through the non-linear organization of ideation flows, experimentation, and identification of gaps. Simply put, an OST is a visual plan for how you will then reach a clear desired outcome.
A product roadmap was built based on the top 7 changes that could be made in the app and the prioritisation was done for the first 3 things in the initial 3 months.
What changed
The 2 factor authentication was replaced by a Single Sign on, helping to prevent many support issues. There haven't been any support tickets relating to login issues since the change.
A new and improved navigation was built to overcome the difficulty with discoverability of features. By doing this, a lot of unused pages were hidden from the main navigation and that helped improve the ease of completing major tasks with minimum clicks.
The product support website was updated with the latest information and more instructions to mitigate the long calls with the support team, thus saving some money on the customer support and also significantly reducing usability issues.
