Increasing user satisfaction and business metrics under time pressure.
The Gardena Smart System comprises a suite of intelligent gardening tools interconnected through an internet-enabled gateway. The initial step in the user onboarding process involves connecting this gateway to the Gardena server.
A comprehensive review of the current process has highlighted significant concerns. As the user's first interaction with the system, the onboarding experience is pivotal in shaping their perception of the product.
In my role as UX Manager, I was responsible for the planning, coordination, and execution of the comprehensive assessment of the smart system.
After identifying and verifying a range of issues within the onboarding process, I was responsible for the redesign in close collaboration with the embedded development team.
The rate of failed initial connections decreased from 70% to 15%, with the remaining errors primarily due to a known technical issue.
Users receive guidance for both Ethernet and Wi-Fi setup, resulting in a 160% increase in gateways initially connected via Wi-Fi.
Minimized customer service inquiries by implementing context-sensitive help screens, enabling users to resolve issues independently.
Including essential data in the contact form has streamlined the customer service process, reducing response times.
The rate of failed initial connections decreased from 70% to 15%, with the remaining errors primarily due to a known technical issue.
Users receive guidance for both Ethernet and Wi-Fi setup, resulting in a 160% increase in gateways initially connected via Wi-Fi.
Minimized customer service inquiries by implementing context-sensitive help screens, enabling users to resolve issues independently.
Including essential data in the contact form has streamlined the customer service process, reducing response times.
To gain a thorough understanding of the entire product line, which has undergone significant evolution over time, my team and I embarked on an extensive expert review. This review encompassed all facets of the product, both digital and non-digital, as well as the interplay between these components. This process revealed that onboarding was a primary area of concern.
To gain a more detailed understanding, we carried out a series of usability tests. These tests showed that a significant number of participants encountered specific issues.
Ultimately, our observations were substantiated by concrete data: 70% of all attempted connections to the system failed.
Setting up the system's physical devices already demands considerable effort from customers. When this is compounded by a complex and unclear digital guidance process, the frustration intensifies significantly.
Customers often resorted to contacting customer service for setup assistance, increasing the team's workload due to the process's complexity and the unique nature of each garden setup.
The onboarding sets crucial initial expectations for the system, and any negative experiences can lead to unfavorable reviews
For the onboarding process redesign, we adopted a lean approach, grounding our decisions in rapid user testing, insights from competitor analysis, and open discussions with the embedded development team to ensure feasibility.
As the gardening season neared, it was crucial to complete and deploy the redesign before its onset. This entailed finalizing the design, programming, quality assurance, and deployment before this key date, placing significant time pressure on the design phase.
Our UX team greatly benefited from an extensive competitor analysis we had previously conducted on comparable IoT products.
This analysis, which detailed crucial steps with comprehensive screenshots and annotations, allowed us to effectively reflect on our own processes. We could discern which strategies to adopt and which to avoid for our system, ensuring a more informed and strategic approach.
This research provided a solid foundation for us to develop initial concepts and explore potential solutions.
In our approach, we prioritized rapidly validating our ideas before delving into detailed solutions. This strategy enabled us to swiftly develop a robust, overarching concept.
In order to explore and test a diverse range of solutions including variations in structure, imagery, text, and help systems, we decided to conducting multiple rounds of unmoderated remote usability testing.
We chose to use the platform rapidusertest.com, which offered several key advantages for us:
Conducting early-stage testing of IoT systems presents its own set of challenges, and these are further amplified in an unmoderated remote environment.
For several of our prototypes, it was crucial for testers to interact not only with the companion smartphone app but also with the physical gateway device.
We aimed to discover:
For these particular prototypes, we chose to use ProtoPie.io, an advanced prototyping tool. This allowed us to simulate a digital gateway that could interact with our app prototype, providing realistic feedback based on user actions with either the app or the gateway itself.
Along with clear instructions and supportive imagery, we opted to incorporate simple, straightforward animations to further enhance the user's understanding of the system's current activities.
We integrated contextual help screens and support options at key points in the process.
If problems occur that can not be resolved by the user, a straightforward customer care contact form is available. This form automatically sends specific data, aiding the customer care team in quickly identifying and addressing the problem's root cause.
We strategically placed checkpoints to confirm the completion of critical setup stages. These checkpoints are designed to be informative yet unobtrusive, providing reassurance without disrupting the user’s flow.
In addition, we incorporated 'technical checkpoints' as fallbacks, ensuring that users don’t need to start over if the app is closed.
To meet our deadline, we aligned the development and design work to proceed in parallel.
As the developers began back-end work for the support system, our focus was on refining the general user flow of the onboarding process.
In collaboration with the development team, we iterated multiple times to create a comprehensive flow that accounted for all potential user scenarios, challenges, and system checks.
This allowed us three main things:
Once we had solidified the general concept and user flow, our focus shifted to fully developing all the screens.
This phase benefited greatly from the insights we gathered during our user testing, which had already explored various combinations of images and text, as well as interaction and feedback patterns.
Our initial plan was to collaborate with a 3D artist to create the final images. This wasn't just a time-saving measure; we aimed for high-quality, professional visuals.
However, due to budget constraints brought on by the uncertainties of the coronavirus pandemic, we had to adapt and find an internal solution, leading me to take on the creation of the final images.
This not only honed my skills in visual design but also ensured that we tailor the images to communicate exactly what was needed by the user.
Our iterative and collaborative approach not only enabled us to complete the Onboarding redesign on schedule, but it also yielded impressive results.
This success is evident in the significant reduction of connection errors, which dropped from 70% to 15%. It's important to note that the remaining errors are primarily due to a technical issue beyond our immediate control.
Particularly instrumental was the user testing-focused experimental phase, which rapidly provided us with a deep understanding of our target objectives. These insights were crucial and informed every subsequent step of our process.
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