Rise.work is a French EdTech startup specialized in online learning for professionals. After a year of activity, they needed UX research in order to...
- Understand how customers used their tools,
- Create better tools that are easier to use,
- Add more features that empower their customers.
As a B2B business, their customers are startups investing in new digital skills but lack the time to invest in it. Rise.work helps people acquire new skills faster with playbooks that teach the 20% of skills needed for 80% of the job. So far, they have worked on an extensive course in SEO and plan to extend their content to SEA, CRO and SMO.
Customers also have access to a series of Google Sheets, where they add data and compare possible keywords options. In a world saturated by video courses, text based step by step courses are a breath of fresh air.
Stakeholders have a macro view of their customers. Their persona, the result of hundreds of calls with potential prospects, is well researched. However, when it comes to detailed UX research...
They don't have the time to research it.
They don't know how customers use their product on a daily basis.
Lastly, they needed insights quickly. Deliverable was due in 7 workdays.
All research was conducted remotely to save time and ressources. My coworker 5 participants from their active customer base.
Data was collected with 4 research methods, done consecutively:
1) Short 20 minutes interview
2) User drawn roadmap
3) Adapted usability scale
4) Desired features
The above order is intentional.
The interviews allow me to not only collect qualitative data, but also to create a rapport with people I met for the first time. This eases them into accepting more active tasks.
The workshops then drill down from a large time scale -how do they integrate Rise.work in a typical workday- to more precise aspects of the product -how users perceive its usability in the present and what features they want to see in the future-.
A good product with a large margin of improvement. Out of 111 insights, 61% are positive, 39% are negative.
Reduce fatigue and friction
customers tend to reserve half a day, or whole workdays right after purchase, to focus on the course content.
1. There are listing, spacing and visual distinction issues on the course material that makes it look "blocky". customers aren't sure where a section ends and another starts.
2. customers like the use of spreadsheets, but are put off by one specific spreadsheet: SEO Sitemap audit. This bottleneck at step 2 drastically reduced the use of the next spreadsheets 3, 4 and 5.
Providing useful guidance makes the process less intimidating
customers usually work alone on the course content and outside of tutor meetings, has total autonomy.
1. Inherent to a product centered on learning new skills, customers are afraid to overdo or underdo.
2. And inherent to a self-learning model, they are afraid to not have made enough progress or to have made mistakes.
3. They want more visibility on the work that has been done.
The results were shared with my coworkers, we agreed on 3 main tasks that kept me occupied for the next months, when I accomplished these tasks and filled both the role of UX and PM:
- Improve grouping on the text assets by adding spaces and colored backgrounds
- Improve the google sheets and transform them into real tools,
- create a synthetic dashboard for customers' weekly meetings in their own companies.
"Compared to working on SEO alone, it's really Rise's added value. I'd have used a spreadsheet but I would never have thought about using combined spreadsheets with searches and all that."
While the conditions of the UX sprint were not ideal, it was also an exciting challenge.
I was pleasantly surprised that my coworkers found the insights enlightening, there learned a lot of things about their customers that they didn't know before.
Lastly, my work as a PM in a small startup implied execution. In the process I have learned the ins and outs of SEO, how to use spreadsheets, how to create a dashboard on Looker Studio. With this interest in data, I embarked in 2023 on learning data analysis, which proves to be an invaluable set of skills to back up my initial UXR orientation.