Customer Insights through Conversations
Company: Cisco-Meraki / Meraki Go product line
Role: Planning for and Conducting Generative Research
THE CHALLENGE:
Planning for feature and UI rollouts was difficult given the product team didn’t know what their target audience (non-technical home user and small business users) actually wanted. In addition the team knew that a UI overhaul was needed, both for improved user experience and to adhere to the Meraki brand guidelines.
The team also didn’t know why a customer would choose Meraki Go over their competitors.
Many of the roadmap features were being driven by power-users who were used to customizing their networks
It was very hard to find non-technical end users to talk with since they didn’t log into their network admin app often
Meraki Go is sold via third party vendors, so Meraki didn’t have customer/buyer contact lists
The product team needed to prioritize the features and experiences that mattered the most to their non-technical audiences
ROUND ONE METHOD + FINDINGS
We did a first round of research with the intention of finding answers to these questions.
We prepared for 1:1 interviews by looking for common pain point themes:
We conducted stakeholder interviews
We spoke with customer support and looked at cases, which we then organized by theme
We looked at community boards and the common issues customers were talking about
However, recruiting for non-technical end customers proved, yet again, to be a challenge during this first round. We ended up speaking with third party IT vendors who were able to share pain points with the current experience.
We conducted remote 1:1 interviews including
why they promoted Meraki Go to their customers
walking though the current experience
sharing and getting feedback on proposed future concepts
Even with the caveat that this round of research didn’t include our intended audience, we were able to use the findings to inform our round two planning. And this research revealed some pretty basic UX/UI problems that any user would have, regardless of their technical expertise.
ROUND TWO METHOD + FINDINGS
Our recruiting strategy for round two - popping open an invitation in the Go phone app - was much more successful in Round Two. Even though far more respondents fit the “IT Pro” persona, we were able to talk with 8 non-technical end users, helping validate hypotheses and uncover some interesting insights.
We conducted remote 1:1 interviews including
why they chose Meraki Go and their experiences getting it up and running
what features they used and didn’t use, and the frequency
sharing and getting feedback on high fidelity prototypes
This round of research helped the product team make better prioritization decisions for launching new experiences and features. In addition, members of the product team sat in on many of these interviews, hearing directly from customers. We were able to make small but impactful updates very quickly in response to some of this new information. Longer-term prioritized features were added to the roadmap.