IMS Health User Research

Example of telemetry data.

Study Planning

Our formal study plan represented our collected decisions for the best approach to this study. We identified the following questions to answer:

1. What do our most current Nexxus Marketing customers look like?

   • Are they captured by our existing personas?

2. How do current customers use Nexxus Marketing?

   • What does success look like?

   • What actions/features are the most valuable to customers?

   • Where do customers face the most friction?

The plan outlined the following:

• The purpose of the study.

• Research questions.

• Participant profiles.

• Interview script.

• Schedule of interviews.

• Facilitation approach.

• Data that will be collected.

• Formal report.

Finding Our Participants

Our engineering support team was able to pull a search query of customers who had been actively using Nexxus Marketing over the last six months. This pool consisted of over 250 participants who worked in marketing agencies and big pharmaceutical companies. I sent an email out to this pool of customers asking if they were interested in participating in a user research interview.

Twenty-six people responded to the email expressing interest. I sent out a second screener asking for their availability and location which narrowed our participant list to 10 people. We interviewed 7 people onsite at their office while the remaining 3 were interviewed virtually using video conference software. Users were compensated with a gift card for their participation.

User Interviews

Our user interviews took place over 2 weeks. I conducted 1 pilot study prior to meeting with the 10 customers. The purpose of the pilot study was to test the interview script and to make sure our technical equipment was working as expected.

I led 8 of the interviews while my UX manager, Cassie, took notes. Molly led one virtual interview.

Me interviewing an internal employee who used Nexxus Marketing for my pilot study.

Findings and Recommendations

I had collected over 90 hours of video footage interviewing customers and looking at how they used Nexxus Marketing. It took me about three weeks to review the footage, collect quotes and video clips, and identify common themes throughout the study. The following were the most common themes:

1. “I need efficient workflows.”

2. “I need to trust the product.”

3. “I want to learn from my results.”

4. “I’d like more robust features.”

"In need efficient workflows."

Some sample problems we witnessed were a lack of order, an inability to archive or find content, poor system response time, and difficulty monitoring new marketing contacts in the user’s database. These were quotes we captured that captured this theme:

• “If you go into our Campaigns you’ll see over 2.5 years… that’s 300 Campaigns. If there was a way we could organize them, that would be very helpful.”

• “System response time is negatively impacting deployment of campaigns.”

Live example of "All Campaigns" page. Not only is this long list unsortable, there is no way to archive or organize the huge volume of campaigns.

We recommended that Nexxus Marketing needed to present it's listview screens with more clearer actionable options, provide the ability to sort, find, and archive items, and improve system response time.

“I need to trust the product.”

Customers struggled using the email editor and testing different tactics within Nexxus Marketing before deployment. The status for different marketing tactics were also not clear and difficult to track. These were quotes we captured that captured this theme:

• “We are phasing out your HTML editor because it is not good… not robust enough.”

• “No idea how to [test tactics]… they just can’t wrap their heads around it, because they are not super technical.”

• “When emails stopped going out, the problem wasn’t discovered for two weeks.”

Live example of an email campaign. The user had to create and send himself several test emails to make sure the email was appearing correctly.