Conexiom
Building Empathy With Personas
Overview
Conexiom is a cloud-based service for trade document automation. The technology transforms unstructured trade documents into structured data. It helps businesses to relocate their employees to value-added tasks while reducing manual intervention.
The UX team defined the target persona by researching the current user experience with Conexiom (Configuration Studio + Partner Portal 5). Moreover, we wanted to identify key opportunity areas to inform the future Product/UX roadmap for Configuration Studio.
Result
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Documented the qualitative data and defined the target persona.
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Validated the purpose of Configuration Studio, which is a no-code solution for user onboarding.
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Reported the research findings to the product owner to inform him about the pain points and provided design recommendations through feature prioritization.
My Role
Responsible for leading the in-depth UX research, transcription, analysis, and presentation.
The Team
Collaborated with a senior designer and a product owner.
Timeline
Approximately 2 weeks including recruitment, research planning, documentation, and analysis.
Project Background
Conexiom has several internal tools for the Implementation Team to onboard customers and automates trade documents. The team uses Partner Portal 5 and Configuration Manager during the onboarding process. Partner Portal 5 is a tool that adds trading partner accounts and manages test documents. Second, the Configuration Manager is for mapping test documents and submitting requests for review from the Connection Development Team. However, these tools tend to have high learning curves and can be overwhelming. Also, it takes, in general, two weeks for the Implementation Team to onboard customers because identifying the frequent trading partners and gathering the test documents is time-consuming (20% of all orders take 80% of CD’s time). The back-and-forth communication with customers frequently occurs and impacts the delay. Due to these challenges, the Product Team introduced a new tool, Configuration Studio. The platform focused on substantially improving the onboarding backlog by empowering the Implementation Team with a no-code solution. It also helps the Connection Development Team to focus more on complex map requests.
For this research project, we wanted to understand if we are on target by gaining a deeper understanding of our users. We also identified a product roadmap for building the Configuration Studio with features that would help map documents. In addition, we were interested in learning about our users' experiences using other internal tools.
Stakeholders
Product Team
A product owner and the UX designers
Implementation Team
Onboarding managers, implementation managers and an account lead.
Sales Engineering Team
Sales engineers and director of sales.
Challenges
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The design team noticed the baseline data was unavailable as we composed user interview questions. We needed to understand their pain points from a holistic view and their general thoughts on the onboarding process to dive deeper into the problem we were trying to solve.
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We did not have any data points in using Partner Portal 5. We needed more holistic views on the current internal tools from people with different expertise.
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There are users with different levels of work experience and using the tool (Novice VS Experts)
Methods
Based on the current challenges, we treated this interview as a first step to developing personable relationships by keeping it conversational. We asked open-ended questions to gather qualitative data while focusing on gathering feedback about Configuration Studio.
30-45 minute interviews split between:
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General pain point discovery (Focusing on Configuration Studio or Partner Portal 5)
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Configuration Studio Introduction Sessions
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Things we need to focus
Objectives
Research Objectives
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Gain a deeper understanding of the user that we are focusing on.
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Gain a deeper understanding of the current customer/internal user experiences with Conexiom (Partner Portal 5 + Configuration Studio)
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Evaluate if Configuration Studio will improve the onboarding process and work efficiency.
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Identify key opportunity areas to help inform future product/UX roadmap.
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Build trust and relationships with users and form a dedicated interview group for design sessions.
Business Objectives
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Decrease the time of the customer onboarding process significantly.
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Identify customer satisfaction rate (measured by DataDog NPS)
Participants
Total = 9
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4 Implementation Managers (with 1-3 years of working experience at Conexiom)
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5 Sales Engineers (3+ years of working experience at Conexiom)
Interview Guide
Discussing with the senior designer, I prepared generic, open-ended questions to initiate unbiased conversation. Also, I had the TEDW method in mind if I wanted to dive deeper. Considering all of the above, these are some of the questions that I included as an interview guide:
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“Tell me about yourself.”
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“What is your Pain point/Challenge?”
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“What is your first impression of Configuration Studio?”
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“Are we on target?”
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"What can we do better?”
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“What would you do differently if you had a magic wand?"
And these questions could be followed by the TEDW method:
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“Tell me more…”
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“Explain..”
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“Describe what you mean by…”
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“Walk me through..”
​Process​
First, I collaborated with the product owner to recruit a group of implementation managers with 1-3 years of working experience at Conexiom. We ensured that they are new to Configuration Studio. And then, I opened a discussion with the senior designer to formulate the interview guide with Confluence. This preparation step was crucial since the questions should be simple and open-ended to gather qualitative data.
We kick-started the research with a group of implementation managers. They had limited experience working at Conexiom (less than three years). We were particularly interested in interviewing them because it was an opportunity to evaluate the first impressions and set the foundation of usability.
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We focused on gathering implementation managers’ general pain points with the internal tools, their processes, and other areas for improvement. Secondly, we ensured a blocked time to introduce Configuration Studio to capture their first impressions. Also, we asked further usability-related questions when we had extra time. Here is a snippet of their feedback and reaction:
We asked if there were any existing challenges with the internal tools. They replied:
After getting to know our users and their challenges, we gave them a tour of Configuration Studio. These were their reactions:
In summary, Configuration Studio is a significant enhancement to Configuration Manager. The implementation managers expressed their excitement to use the tool after some training sessions. They also provided new feature recommendations for Configuration Studio that support them in communicating with other implementation managers.
Interviewing the sales engineers
After interviewing implementation managers, we continued the conversation with the Sales Engineering team. They were not the direct users, but we believed that the Sales Engineering Team's close relationships with our customers and their understanding of Conexiom tools would help connect the dots.
Each sales engineer had a different work experience at Conexiom. We focused more on what they had to share with us. First, we noticed that their pain points differed from the Implementation Manager Team.
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Second, we asked a question about things we should focus on since they had different points of view for empowering our customers. Most sales engineers saw Configuration Studio as another nice-to-have tool which did not necessarily solve their pain points. As we dived deeper into the conversation with them, we discovered that the sales engineers had been struggling with the production side. Also, they indicated that the fewer manual audits customers do, the more valuable Conexiom is for our customers.
After finishing all the meetings with both teams, I transcribed the interview recordings and documented the collected data on Figma. And then, I analyzed and synthesized the data to present the research findings to the product owner and the senior designer.
These are the formulated personas based on the data:
Persona 1 - Implementation Manager
Persona 2 - Sales Engineer
Key Takeaway
Collaborating with a product owner and a senior designer on this project, we gained a better understanding of our users and a holistic view of the work process of selling the product and onboarding customers.
We were right about...
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Implementation managers will enjoy Configuration Studio’s simplicity and easy-to-use interface with more controls.
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Implementation Managers still need the training to use Configuration Studio.
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Implementation managers can handle easy mapping requirements and reduce the burden by using Configuration Studio.
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Both teams agree that a hand-holding feature within the Configuration Studio would be efficient and helpful for users.
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Both teams had experiences of customers complaining about Partner Portal’s performance (slowness).
We were surprised that...
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Both implementation managers and sales engineers recognize the value of providing Configuration Studio to Champion customers (tech-savvy).
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Sales Engineers were not clear about the target persona of Configuration Studio.
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Sales Engineers see no business opportunity until Configuration Studio offers a simple interface for CSR-level users.
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We are missing the step of talking to our customers.
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Many Sales Engineers feel that Configuration Studio does not solve the fundamental production issue. (integration with ERPs).