HiveDesk is a remote work management tool, mainly concentrated on making it easy for managers and employees to track the time, progress, productivity, and activity. HiveDesk has a webapp, and a desktop client.
HiveDesk UX Audit and Research
The Scope
In this research-only project we collaborated with HiveDesk during a 4 week period. Our aim was to discover the main challenges and motivations of the target audience so that aligned with business goals it could determine the direction and UX strategy of the product.
The Objective
The goal of this project was to do a UX audit conduct research in order to get an overview of the state of the products, and getting to know more about customers and their needs. Our client wanted to get guidance on how to go on with the product – what to fix first, what to put the effort in, and how to place their product in this highly competitive industry.
What they needed was product strategy, and a roadmap based on customer needs and business risks and to know what target condition they want to reach.
The Plan
- UX researcher role – 2 UX researchers were dedicated to performing a UX audit – to understand the ‘as is’ state of the product, and know more about user needs and problems.
- Kick-off workshops – As the HiveDesk team itself works remotely, we conducted our participatory collaborative workshops online.
- Competitor Analysis-This activity was an essential starting point for us as it helped us to understand the industry and competitors. The HiveDesk team already had a basic competitor analysis – more from a business perspective so we have completed it by adding more aspects (from a UX perspective) as well as investigating many more direct and indirect competitors.
- Personas- We started out with two personas in mind. From the beginning, we felt strongly about including employees, but before we got to interviewing we didn’t know we needed to have two separate groups when it came to HiveDesk customers. During the UX Audit, we found out that a business owner rarely deals with the tracking tools and has other challenges only indirectly related to the software used for logging, invoicing and managing work. On the other hand, managers are very hands-on with the software and keep a personal relationship with the remote employees who are outsourced through their agency. They are the ones actually using the admin account of tracking and invoicing tools. Therefore, we iterated on and completed the personas after conducting the interviews.
The Challenges and Learnings
We realized remote employees are also stakeholders, disregarded so far, so we had to react fast and include them as a target group into the research as well as getting the clients on board with expanding the target audience of our interviews.
By the end of the fourth week we gained a lot of insights essential for planning the future of the product. The HiveDesk team also reported that their priorities became much clearer, and as they saw the power of interviews they pledged to talk more to customers and users in the future – from all three groups.
Therefore, we iterated on and completed the personas after conducting the interviews.