CRM Usability Study

2022, 2023

The Problem

The customer relationship management tool has as over 5,000 daily users that are complaining about broken functionality that stops them from completing their daily tasks.

The Goal

Conduct a usability study and discover any pain points that prevent users from completing their daily tasks.

The Process

• Identify the current personas that are utilizing the CRM and gather initial insights into their day to day tasks

• Create a list of generic questions that guide their daily routine & prepare a script to use during testing sessions

• Complete user testing & take notes

• Analyze findings and discover major pain points

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Fifteen moderated usability interviews were conducted over the course of a month. Round one included 7 users and round two had 8 users. All users were asked to block an hour of their time to run through the use of the CRM and go through an example day in their life. Several pain points were uncovered and common themes were found amongst our users.

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The Method

My UX team and I started off by creating a research plan that helped with the preparation of the case study. It encompasses the what, why, and how this usability study was conducted. We then proceeded to create an email template to ensure consistency when scheduling the interview sessions with our users. After the first round of interviews were scheduled, we crafted a script to be used while moderating the interview sessions.

During the actual interviews, the moderator was responsible for prompting the user with the questions mentioned in our research plan. The notetaker was responsible for keeping track of important details, such as, their body language or feelings when asked to perform a task. My co-worker and I took turns being both the moderator and notetaker to eliminate bias. After the interviews were completed, the notetaker summarized their findings and recorded it in an excel, similar to this. 

The Results

We took every piece of feedback received from our users and assigned them a category based on the common themes found within the analysis. We created a FigJam file to organize all of our findings and then proceeded to prioritize improvements based on our teams' bandwidth at the time.

61

pain points were discovered within the CRM

90%

of users had the same pain points

45%

of pain points were relieved in the first iteration

Biggest Pain Points Discovered:

• When managers wanted to view a single case out of all the cases assigned to themselves, it opened the case in a new tab. In case the manager wanted to go back and view all cases again, it would not preserve scroll position. This meant the manager had to go through hundreds of cases every single time they needed to find a specific case. 

• All users were unable to properly search for cases in the Global Search bar located at the very top of the website. Instead of being able to quickly search for something within the entire UI, users had to manually go searching for the case they needed based on where they knew it was previously located.

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Lesson Learned

Conducting my first usability study taught me the importance of preparation, flexibility, and observation. I learned that even small gaps in task instructions can confuse users, emphasizing the value of pilot testing before full sessions. I also discovered how crucial it is to stay neutral, resisting the urge to help participants led to more authentic insights into usability issues. Overall, this experience reinforced that firsthand user feedback is essential to a well functioning product and that well-run research requires both careful planning and adaptability.