Background

Discovery research was conducted to better understand what kinds of features are important to customers in the logged-in experience on our equipment rental website. The current experience included being able to manage projects and invoices through the website. Findings from the discovery research phase highlighted key features that were missing from the experience that were important to customers and employees. It was important to include and to consider these features when moving forward with building the new My Account experience. These features were presented to customers, non-customers and employees using the Kano analysis methodology to rate and help guide feature inclusion decisions.

Research Goal

Understand the prioritization and needs for including necessary and new features to improve the My Account experience.

Research Questions

• Identify what features are a priority to customers? Non-customers? Employees? Are they similar or different?

• What features are must-haves to include in My Account improvements?

• What features can be low priority or are not necessary to include in My Account?

Methodology

Kano analysis survey

I selected this methodology because it is a proven approach for gaining insights into optimizing the product experience for key users.

What features did I ask about?

• ability to make payments online

• ability to run reports on your own from your account

• seeing real time location of equipment on a map

• being able to save favorite pieces of equipment in your account

• having automatic notifications regarding account changes

• having automatic notifications regarding reservation changes

• being able to edit and manage projects online

• having the ability to manage purchase order spending in your account

• having the ability to schedule automatic rental call-off dates when making a reservation

• being able to import and track your own assets in your account

• having the option to approve account or rental changes by other users

Features were presented in a survey asking participants how they would feel it they had that feature, how they would feel if they didn’t have that feature, and the importance of that feature to them.

This survey was completed by 90 participants total, which included:

• 30 customers who use the My Account experience

• 30 company employees who have used / are familiar with the My Account experience.

• 30 non-company customers who have rented equipment as part of their business within the last 6 months who manage their equipment online.

The data was then analyzed, plotted on a chart, and compared to better understand which features were most important to each group.

Crucial Insights

• Being able to favorite equipment is a feature that increases satisfaction and functionality for customers and non-customers, but is something that employees could live without.

• Making payments online is an attractive feature for customers, It is a high performance feature that employees would like to see investment in improving.

• Notifications regarding equipment reservations were equally important to customers, non-customers, and employees.

Impacts

• Led a feature prioritization exercise with product team leaders to determine top features for the new experience roadmap, resulting in a strategic alignment that accelerated product development and enhanced user satisfaction.

• The organization gained deeper knowledge on the key tasks that impact our customer experiences on our website.

Learnings

• Don’t be afraid to try a new methodology! This was a new methodology for me, but it was the best methodology to use that created the highest impact results for the goal of the research; the work was worth the reward.

• Engage your stakeholders! The more engaged stakeholders are in the process, the more willing they are to listen and incorporate your findings.