User Research | Lean UX | Visual Design | Prototyping | Agile
DellEMC.com is a destination for customers, both current and prospective, to visit and learn about Dell's technology solutions it offers. If you're not sure what a "technology solution" is, you are not alone. Our customers are often in the same boat. Traditionally the company had seen solutions as the answer to a problem without speaking to the problem that actually needs to be solved. Our task on this project was to figure out how to better market our solutions towards the outcomes that customers were trying to achieve.
We were a cross-functional agile team consisting of 1 designers, 2 product managers, and 6 engineers. We were also paired up with Pivotal consultants to help train some of the newer members of the team on working in an agile environment. My role as the sole designer was to conduct research both in person and through video, lead all exercises including synthesis and design workshops, prototype and test all concepts.
We began this project with thoroughly mapping out the goals of the project which include business, team, product, and anti-goals. The main goals being to improve customer's understanding of the technology solutions Dell offers and how they solve their business outcomes. This is with the hopes that customers could more confidently take their intended business outcome and effectively find a solution by themselves before having to engage any sales agents. While this may sound easy, business outcomes are infinite, and getting in the ballpark of the right solution is challenging.
There is a lot to assume here, and a lot that we didn't know at the time so deeper research was absolutely necessary. Some of the greater assumptions were that customer's even know what all products Dell offered and more importantly what do they do. We also assumed that customers would want to or feel comfortable with taking on this task without the help of a technical expert.
Based off the fact that we had so many assumptions and unknowns, generative user interviews were the obvious next step. With the full team present we set out mapping all the questions we had around how a technologist identifies business objectives, researches and evaluates potential solutions and executes on their objectives.
Utilizing UserTesting.com we were able to screen in technologists from medium to large companies that typically had the titles of CTO, IT Manager, and in some cases CEOs. This gave us a broad audience with responsibilities that spanned anywhere from high-level thought leadership and trends all the way to implementation of hardware.
After interviews we had a good idea of what the problem was and it was time for a little design fun. We had the entire team and a couple of key stakeholders join in on drawing out their concepts before dot voting on the the ideas we felt would be the most effective and impactful to the customer experience.
We not only had the opportunity to interview technologists through UserTesting.com, about 15 of them, but we also had a unique opportunity to meet actual Dell customers at the annual Dell Technologies World in Las Vegas, Nevada. With our concepts in hand we spoke with countless and medium, large, and even enterprise level customers and were able to run our concepts by them and iterate on our ideas in the afternoon after everyone had left for the evening.
At this point we were confident in the direction we were headed and defined our MVP by simply asking customers what industry they were in and what they were looking to do. With the responses from that we were able to at least get customers pointed in the right direction and ultimately convert them into a qualified warm lead at which point a sales person could step in.
