Quarterly Customer Insights

Challenge and Selection

I work in the SaaS space, within the maritime industry. Our software runs on ships, and, typically, our  customers do not understand the quality and value of what we do as it just works and they don’t  need to interact with it on a daily basis. However, when budgeting comes, we are often under  scrutiny because with quality comes a higher price tag. We wanted to step away from the “silent  mode”, and create a periodic channel with our customers that would show the value of what we do  and provide. A challenge within the challenge was that our customers were not used to these things  so we needed to create something that would convey the message and get their attention right  away.

I have always been a big fan of visual aids, so visualization was my tool of choice. I suggested to  gather the whole team in front of a very large whiteboard to discuss how to reach our goal in the  simplest way.

We believed visualization was the tool that would allow us to reach our goal in the most direct way.  We started to explore the various personas we could address among our customer base. We wanted  to target the top guys, the ones that would give us an average of 5 seconds to get their attention.  Visualizing our core message would give us higher odds.

Application

Once in front of the whiteboard, we discussed the format we wanted to deliver. We all agreed it had  to be a at-a-glance report. Something that could easily fit a A4 page. So, we drew a big rectangle to  represent our A4 page. We did several iterations on the structure and on the selection of the main  topic. It could not be too cramped, so we tried to identify 3 main topics we wanted to visualize in  that rectangle.

Insight and Approach

The first prototype was tested on internal staff that is heavily exposed to the target audience we  were trying to address. A few tweaks were applied and we finally had a good prototype to bring to  the customers. We tested the simple design (our design team had not been involved yet!) on 5  customers we knew well and we quickly realised the most interest was on the actual raw analytics  that we so badly tried to prettify using some kind of infographics. We switched back to numbers and  found a format that could stay within the boundaries of an A4 sheet.

The biggest insight was that the end result turned out to be a hybrid of visualization and storytelling,  as the target audience appreciated a certain flow in the overview, and we used their story to get to  that.

The whole process was extremely fun and enriching. If I was to do this again, I would probably  include someone with more visualization experience (i.e. from our design team) earlier in the  process, just to get their input. It would be interesting to try the same using storytelling. As soon as

we realised an hybrid could work, we saw how important it was to the story we were trying to tell,  and our customer’s stories.

