Moving Beyond Oslo
What if there was something wrong with your website that prevented almost a quarter of your potential clients from completing making a purchase? That’s the problem that a leading Scandinavian airline faced a few years ago when they started testing a new version of their website. Fortunately, at the same time, the first version of Task Analytics’ survey software was emerging from the offices of Netlife Design, one of Norway’s premier design agencies. The idea was to measure the top tasks through customer journey through a website. Task Analytics was used to measure user intent, identify bottlenecks, and understand why users didn’t complete key tasks.
When the leading Scandinavian airline employed us, they figured out almost immediately why some customers were unable to book flights — and online bookings quickly grew by exponentially.
Likewise, a leading Norwegian postal service provider, uncovered a major problem around why customers were unable to track their packages. After deploying Task Analytics, they addressed the design issue and drastically improved the customer’s ability to track their package on the new site.
As intent-based measurement became better understood by senior executives — and as leading enterprises leaned into agile development and more frequent site releases — our clients began wanting to run Task Analytics continuously. Our product team dove into delivering new features to enable teams to constantly collect data, analyze it over time, and identify trends.
As our customer base grew, we had two ways forward: hire more domain experts who could assist our clients, or make it easier for our clients to create an account, build out their task list, and start collecting data. We went for the latter, committing ourselves to deliver on the use cases and features that would allow our consultancy + software company to transform into a pure software-as-a-service company. And we would deliver the high-touch consultancy some customers would still want through our network of design agencies.
So now we’re mid-flight, as the saying goes — flying the plane as we build it, speaking with customers, meeting agency partners, learning new systems, and eating our own dog food as we build this new SaaS version of Task Analytics.
We know it won’t be perfect. There will be things not yet built or even thought of in this initial SaaS MVP (minimal viable product). But the goal is to be as customer-centric as possible, and we encourage you to try it out, tell us what you like, and more importantly, what you don’t like. Where can we make it easier for you? Our mantra is, design with empathy for the customer. We believe that understanding user intent is foundational to empathetic design; creating a simple and intuitive experience that the customer seamlessly navigates.
It’s been an amazing journey evolving our business into a SaaS product offering, and there’s a lot more to come. We have ideas and ambitions for how to add unparalleled value for our clients and agency partners. In the future, industry benchmarks and analytics, the auto-generation of task lists, and AI-based UX resolution recommendations will enable designers to simplify designs to better align business goals with user goals.
For now, we’re excited to release our SaaS MVP to the world as we fundamentally evolve our business — and we know this is just the first step in our evolution.
