Infogroup is a leading software-as-a-service (SaaS) developer, offering a range of big data, analytics, and marketing solutions to help companies increase sales and customer loyalty. Their clients range from small companies to FORTUNE 100 enterprises.
The User Experience team at Infogroup are small in number but big in ambition. They are working to design the next generation of solutions for businesses to discover sales leads, track their prospecting and create stunning marketing campaigns. The team is responsible for defining and evolving all user experiences for a range of industry-leading SaaS applications in the sales and marketing space.
With a number of products being worked on at all times, an aggressive roadmap and limited resources, the team must be as efficient as possible in their design process. They have embraced rapid prototyping and evaluation methods to meet their goals.
UsabilityHub is a great tool with a low barrier to entry. Try it out before investing in high-cost validation methods.
“We ultimately seek not only to practice design within our own team but to influence the way our entire product organization thinks about creating products”, says Benjamin Koh, VP Product Design & User Experience at Infogroup. “The ability to quickly conduct usability research/tests and share the reports in an easily understood format is key to realizing this goal.”
The scope of work the User Experience team at Infogroup undertakes cannot be underestimated. On any given week they could be working on:
Along with the challenging nature of the work itself, there are multiple stakeholders on projects, each with competing demands to consider. These can take the form of internal technology teams, end-users of the product, or the clients who requested the product.
The process can result in many small questions needing validation throughout a complex project life-cycle. While they focus their heavy-hitting UX validation efforts on the big items, they cannot ignore the secondary issues that–while more minor in impact–can add up to create significant analysis paralysis or delays if not addressed promptly. By acknowledging and validating small user experience issues as they are raised, the project as a whole has a greater chance of success while hitting necessary milestones.
UsabilityHub enables Infogroup’s User Experience team to establish a primary benchmark to facilitate decision making, allowing them to reach the finish line faster and iterate based on real usage data from production.  Nothing replaces getting feedback on the actual product under real-world constraints.
The User Experience team first found out about UsabilityHub after searching online for a simple tool to meet their “small question” research needs. The online test creation tool minimized the time spent setting up tests, while the ability to painlessly recruit participants from the UsabilityHub panel also meant responses could be collected in minutes. The results can then be rapidly distributed in a format that can be understood by all stakeholders.
Benjamin’s team largely uses UsabilityHub to provide insights and feedback related to digital layouts, written content, icon recognition, and color choices.
For instance, when the team debated the merits of updating a legacy homepage with modern design elements and layout, they wanted to perform a quick diagnostic test to determine whether to continue investing resources into the initiative. UsabilityHub gave Infogroup the means to rapidly collect feedback, as shown in this test, where the results gave them a green light to confidently move forward with the design project.
To validate that the new design was an improvement over the old design, the team created a preference test, asking 25 participants to answer the question “Which visual design do you prefer?” The results were clear.
Infogroup runs extensive testing services for many of their products, using traditional user experience research techniques, including real-time interviews, focus groups, data collection, and analysis from logs. UsabilityHub is often used as a quick reference point before deciding to invest more time into a higher cost validation method.
Conducting user research doesn’t have to be lengthy or time-consuming. Infogroup has mastered the art of knowing where to spend their time; doing fast, accessible research through UsabilityHub, then expanding out into traditional research techniques when required. Just as Infogroup as a whole is data-driven, so the Product Design and User Experience team use smart data to run their own business.
If you’d like to see how UsabilityHub can help your business, reach out to us at sales@usabilityhub.com.
