Prompt for teams: user research to discover new opportunities
Aim
Creating a new value proposition for a legacy product- SQL Prompt, through user research.
Role
As the Senior Product designer on this project, it was my responsibility to work with the Product Managers to strategically align with the product's roadmap, plan and conduct the user research and finally collaborate with the engineers to build out the offering. I led a team of 2 interaction designers for the build and deploy phase.
Outcome
‘Prompt for teams’ went live in 2021 after a successful Early Access Programme for a selected number of users, with plans to extend the offering to a wider bundle of tools. The key added value here was to create an easy way for users to be able to maintain code standards with their team and share common resources.
THE PROBLEM SPACE
SQL Prompt is one of Redgate’s flagship products with a very dedicated user group. However, over the years there has been a stagnation in its revenue. Given that it forms the main share of the transactional revenue stream, it became important to try and tackle this. Historically, the tool has been used by individuals. But with the company shifting its focus towards larger enterprise tooling there was an interesting opportunity to see what a collaborative offering for Prompt might be like.
EXPLORATION THROUGH RESEARCH
A large challenge here was bringing alignment in the team and making a case for this exploration. The general belief was that users don’t work in a traditional team setup and more importantly, have not directly requested for this feature.
This was an excellent opportunity to help the team understand the importance of focussing on user needs and not necessarily their wants. I used previously conducted user research and other secondary resources to highlight some key aspects which helped bring the team on board and then conducted a workshop to refine the research questions for the next round.
Workshop conducted with the team to draw insights from secondary research.
Using wireframes as a research tool
Apart from a questionnaire, I also created some conceptual wireframes as a research probe. These were suggestive enough for the users to respond to, while not being too specific on certain details. Gathering user reactions to some of these were helpful to validate some assumptions as well as learn about possible next steps.
Conceptual wireframes used during rseearch.
User research
The first round of research consisted of speaking to 13 users of varying backgrounds to build our understanding further.
KEY insights from user research
1. Team lead style persona
Even though most existing users did not follow a traditional setup, there were some users tasked with jobs that fell in the bracket of a team lead. This became the key user we decided to focus on.
2. Hacks for sharing
There was no straightforward way for users to share information with each other. During the previous interviews, users mentioned several roundabout ways in which they shared with team members.
3. Maintaining standards & knowledge transfer
There was a clear pain point around maintaining team standards. Having different clients added to the complexity here. Apart from that, there was a big challenge with scale and turnover.
solution: workflow
A big challenge for the design phase was the workflow between the platform- a shared space in the web browser and SQL Prompt which is embedded within the IDE. It was essential to create a seamless experience that didn’t add to user frustration.
solution: product
The final solution consisted of an easy way to onboard, set up a team and share resources to help create team standards in code and share resources.
IMPACT
Prompt for teams went live in 2021 after a successful Early Access Programme. The solution has been well received by users and the team is planning to extend the team based offering to a wider product bundle.