Revamping Internal Tools
A Journey to Improve User Experience
Every enterprise has a number of products which it offers to its customers and then it also has products which are offered internally to its own employees.
Most of the times, these internal tools are not a high priority effort and times a lot of tools which are built internally are do not undergo the same level of user experience design and research as the user facing products.
Outcome: A tool which is great, but still the customers are left un-happy.
So, being someone who engineers this product, what can you do?
The next set of points document some of the learnings while turning around a product which had generally bad perception and a high failure rate, into a product which is now relied on in multiple issue and outage investigations.
So, what should you do:
Identify your top users: Start with identifying who the top users of your product are, this enables you to see the organizational usage and demographics of who is using your tool and how much. This helps you narrow down where to start your efforts from
Categorize your users between happy and most frustrated: Once the top users are identified, categorize your users into two major groups:
Happy users
Frustrated users
The idea with this categorization is to understand, what is working for the users who are happy and what is not working for users who are feeling frustrated.
Build closed loops: With users now categorized, establish a closed loop with your users, where there feedback is sought, triaged and prioritized. Make them feel valued and stakeholders in your success, and keep the communication channel on-going.
Prioritize user happiness: There are always times when teams are struck between launching that shiny new feature. But, what good is the shiny new feature when the existing features and product experience is painful.
It is important to first prioritize the most glaring user experience pain points rather than prioritizing new features one after another.
Be reasonable, it is going to take time: User experience and satisfaction doesn’t turns around in days or months. Depending upon what your product focuses on, it might take quarters before there is an appreciable turn around. Do not stop! Keep interacting with your users and iterating.
If you have been in a similar journey, do share what worked for you :D