User Researcher
Journey Mapping & Empathy
Understanding the user journey is more about discovery and knowledge share than the map itself.
Context and Goals
Einstein Analytics is Salesforce's analytics platform that allows users to connect to their Salesforce data and create dynamic visualizations that provide actionable insights. The aim of this project was to understand the end-to-end experience of using Einstein Analytics.
There are three tracks for using Einstein Analytics (EA):
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Data prep: connecting to data and creating data sets.
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Dashboard building - building visualizations and dashboard from the data sets.
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Consuming- end-user “consumption” of dashboards to make decisions.
But these three tracks were owned by teams siloed from one another so there was no clear journey from one track to the next. Previous research and other feedback channels showed a clear pain point: it was difficult to use and there's a lot of documentation to read.
This led to a question that launched and framed the journey map project:
"What does it take to get insights from Einstein Analytics?"
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When Einstein Analytics is turned on for a customer, what do they have to do to learn and use the product to provide insights to the end-user? What task do they have to do, who is involved and what is the sentiment of the experience?
This was the start of the journey map project.
Persona
Given the end-to-end nature of the project it was necessary to target all of our personas:
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Salesforce Admin - allocating licenses and turning on features
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Data Wrangler/Architect - creating data sets
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Analyst - building dashboards
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End User - consuming the dashboards
Method
Journey maps are a visual representation of the touch points between a user and a product through different channels over time. Now, journey maps are just an artifact and it's really the process of creating it that provides the insights. And I hoped this method would provide the insights we needed to further understand the pain points of the product.
The downside of these maps is that they don't guarantee results and can be a "boiling the ocean" exercise. To prevent this I used the initial research question (see above) as way to scope the map and prevent it from going off the rails.
I then engaged the UX designers, documentation team, product managers, and Customer Service Group, who help customers with complex problems, and I asked them to write down the steps necessary to get started and use our product. After many interviews, post-its and iterations the map took shape and we had a high level view of major user tasks needed to be successful with EA.
Immediately we saw two big insights:
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The product requires a linear waterfall-like process. Every step needed to be done correctly or the proceeding steps afterward would be sabotaged.
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Many of steps requires documentation and training to complete with no indication of where it was in the UI.
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I began to audit the learning resources and found that they were scattered and hard to find. So, I decided to focus my research efforts on understanding the customer learning experience.
The journey map wasn't pretty but building it revealed a waterfall process that made it easy for users to fail.
Getting Buy-In
No one likes being the bearer of bad news but it’s necessary to make a positive impact. I knew I needed to share these insight but most importantly I needed to make it “sticky.” I wanted people to hear it, remember it, and take action on it. This required getting the right people involved so I invited the Director of Product Documentation and (at the time) the Director of Product Management to the research session with customers. These sessions were intended to understand the product pain points throughout the user journey and foster user empathy.
The sessions highlighted major problems and provided the empathy stakeholders needed to really push for change in how our customers learn the product. The Director of Product Management wanted more so she told me to share with other, so I started sharing the insights with the VP of Design, General Manager, and eventually the entire product team. People listened and it started conversations about how to make the product better.
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This led to more appetite for this work so we continued doing more of these sessions. It was a heavy lift to continue them so I partnered with another researcher (Richa Prajapati) to help with the workload. She has much more to say about journey mapping and empathy in her Medium post here, which details our work in greater depth.
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Socializing the journey map to the product teams
Results
One of the results was the creation of the Onboarding & Education team, whose sole role is to improve the Einstein Analytics learning experience. Together we came up with a few solutions to improve the learning experience. First was the Einstein Analytics Learning Map, which is a consolidated location for all resources to learn Einstein Analytics and guide users to next steps. The second was the Einstein Analytics Learning Adventure app (which has its own story) and debuted on the Salesforce AppExchange as a free resource to provide interactive guidance on dashboard best practices. These and other features debuted at Dreamforce 2018 during the Einstein Analytics keynote.
Dreamforce '18 debut of new learning resources as a result of the journey map