Background
In the booming IoT and M2M industry, enterprises globally have been facing challenges associated with managing connectivity efficiently; Ericsson offers a platform-based solution that users (business customers) control over the SIMs deployments and network management.
I joined Ericsson R&D team as the UX consultant(external) for about 1.5 years with the objective of empowering the team to further develop the platform with outstanding customer experience.
Impact
The client team formed deeper understanding of the needs of major customer segments. More importantly, based on the insights, new product features were created and developed to make the platform more competitive on the market. Not to mention the client started embracing a more structured user research phase that includes regular engagement with the end users and user knowledge sharing session within the team.
Digging deep into the customer needs by remote interviews and field study
B2B service development is often sales/volume driven instead of a comprehensive understanding on both customer needs and business objectives. The client team was facing the same challenge, although some level of user-centric thinking had been applied to the R&D process . As a result, the team found it hard to get aligned from time to time and be committed to certain iteration due to the insufficient level of understanding of end users needs.
Field research in Jakarta, Indonesia
To tackle this issue, 3 research-oriented projects were co-lead by design lead and me to build in-depth understanding of the consumers, especially the ends users. Specifically, I was in charge of more than 50 remote interviews/concept testing with the end users from the globe and running a study an emerging market to visit customers in person. Moreover, I was doing the heavy lifting of the Insights synthesis phase and drafting documentation. It includes articulated users needs based on customer segments(industry by industry, Shared Global VS Region Specific) and persona with in-depth content, like goals, quotes and attributes. Those served as the base for building knowledge, and was
Persona overview
Sharing insights and evaluating the needs through workshops
To keep the key stakeholders of the product team on the same page in terms of the user knowledge also to be more collaborative in discussion-making process , dedicated insights sharing workshop were held regularly.
Workshops often started with my presentation on the latest research findings， in which, user quotes, pictures and short clips were utilised extensively to enabled the audience to easily grasp the specific user context and relate to the needs and frustrations. After the sharing, there were time reserved for Q&As, which followed by Define and Ideation activities sometimes. Moscow and value matrix were the most used methods for discussion and and debates.
Value matrix
Designing new features in design sprints
Drafts, concepts and prototypes are not attached here due to NDA.
