Lessons in Enterprise User Research
Reflections on working in user research at AppDynamics, a leading application performance management (APM) solution serving over 3,000 organizations.
Notable Team Stats (over a 2 year period):
Studies completed: 80+
Interviews conducted: 150+
Interview hours: 250+
Number of cities traveled for contextual inquiry: 20+
- Start with the Persona
In the enterprise world, you are selling a product to a group of individuals and a persona is a general depiction of a particular user type with certain needs and motivations. The CIO or executive with the authority to sign off on a multi-million dollar contract is quite different from the end user who sets up and configures the tool. Both of these personas play a role in product success but have to be considered independently as their use cases with the product may be distinct, overlapping, or somewhere in between.
2. Every Customer Organization is Different
When you have thousands of large organizations as customers, it becomes important to assess the unique characteristics of each customer company across different dimensions. Does the organization support centralized vs. de-centralized ownership and responsibility for its software releases? Has the customer moved to a more distributed microservices architecture? Do the teams within the customer organization have a clearly defined process to identify and remediate application issues? All of these factors can greatly influence how your product is adopted and utilized within their organization. Categorizing organizations across these dimensions also becomes a challenging exercise but one in which the idea of a persona can extend to a customer company.
3. You are NOT a Special Snowflake
When you live and breathe your product and its feature set on a daily basis it is easy to get caught up in the hype. Spend a few hours observing how your product is used at a customer company and you will realize it is one tool among a myriad of tools needed to satisfy a business need. One team within a company might be using your product while another team within the same company might be piloting a competing product. Understanding how customer companies utilize different products is extremely useful when assessing which areas your product has a competitive advantage and more importantly, conceding on feature ideas where a competitor is much further ahead.
4. Uncover the Relative Value
Sharing a new shiny mock up or prototype showcasing an upcoming feature will quite often illicit a favorable reaction (“YES, I need this feature!”). Determining its value relative to other capabilities is a much more difficult endeavor but one that can be highly valuable for product and engineering teams who have to make difficult tradeoffs with a road map of competing items. Research exercises and tools our team has used with prioritization and general usability include the bulls eye diagram, buy-a-feature, and UMUX-Lite.
5. Make it Intuitive
Users don’t know what they don’t know. Rich and powerful features are of no value if they (1) cannot be discovered and (2) are not intuitive to use. Enterprise customer engagements may offer hands-on support from sales engineering and customer success teams but a large number of users may never realize this benefit and have to learn and adopt product capabilities on their own. Strong design, writing / contextual help, documentation, and user research (shameless plug) will increase the likelihood a new feature is well received and adopted.
Final Thoughts
Our research team and practice is still relatively young and while we have gained an immense amount of knowledge and insights there is still a lot to be uncovered. The landscape of enterprise solutions and technology stacks are constantly changing and evolving. Keeping abreast of all these developments in combination with planning and conducting effective customer studies will be an ongoing priority.
Interested in joining our team? We’re hiring!
Do you use AppDynamics? Join our user panel!
Design@AppD is leading a transformation of AppDynamics into a user-centered enterprise product company. Interested in following along? Consider following us on Medium!
