Bright Analytics

had an amazing platform with a ton of great features that their power users loved. But what about everyone else?

 

I took Dave Miller, Bright Analytics’ CPO, along to research sessions so he could hear directly from users.

 

Context

A small but mighty team delivering a business intelligence platform to marketing clients, Bright Analytics had never carried out user research before.

Challenge

The team had built a lot of fantastic features based on customer feedback. However the product was starting to get overloaded and complicated. It wasn’t clear how to prioritise the backlog to deliver both value and clarity to users.

Delivered

In a rapid 3-week project I met and interviewed Bright Analytics users and observed them using the product. I worked side-by-side with the Bright Analytics team to ensure that the research scope fit with their expectations and prioritised. I also brought them to research sessions with me so they could gain a deeper understanding of their users’ perspectives and challenges. From this research I developed:

  • A prioritised set of usability issues with suggested solutions, including wireframes

  • A clickable prototype demonstrating a more sustainable design vision for the future of the product

  • Deeper insights into users’ high level goals and what they needed from the platform.  

I created a research repository using Airtable and showed the team how to use this to track progress against research recommendations and assess product ideas against research insights.

This work has continued to inform the design and evolution of the platform over the 18 months since I worked with Bright Analytics.

“We are a company with a small team and a large, thorny, complicated product in the data analytics and reporting space. The tool we’d built was very powerful and flexible, but put a lot of that complexity front-and-centre. This was working well for power users, but we received a lot of support tickets from less advanced users trying to accomplish simpler reporting tasks. Folks who spent less time working in the platform were getting lost trying to do things that should have been easy.

Polly facilitated a short but invaluable round of research sessions with our users. We spent time going through findings together, ranking and organising things. She then took this away to produce some really incredible, comprehensive documentation for us. 

This gave us a clear picture of where users were having trouble understanding the product, or options they were struggling to find. It was so helpful to see a clear hierarchy of our users’ needs when trying to accomplish reporting tasks.

Polly synthesised the findings into a series of wireframes that then formed the basis of a software project to deliver a fresh report-building widget. Since launching the re-designed report builder, we’ve seen significantly reduced customer support burden in this area. 

Even though it was a short project, watching the systematic, comprehensive way that Polly assembled and organised information to understand the problem space taught us lessons that continue to inform how we work and design software.”

Dave Miller, Chief Product Officer, Bright Analytics