Report Product Indicator
Report Product Indicator
Forrester specializes in market research, providing over 80,000 reports to help businesses make smarter decisions. It collaborates with B2B clients, particularly executives and team leaders, to shape outcomes. Customer success teams use these reports to set objectives, define key results, and identify KPIs for go-to-market strategies. To enhance preparation for critical client conversations, a more effective solution was needed for operations and sales teams.
Role
Design Lead, Researcher, Project Manager
Duration
February 2022 – August 2022
Process
Discovery, Design, Testing, Release, Iteration, Reflection
Tools
Figma, UserTesting, Teams, Jira, Slack
Role
Design Lead, Researcher, Project Manager
Duration
February 2022 – August 2022
Process
Discovery, Design, Testing, Release, Iteration, Reflection
Tools
Figma, UserTesting, Teams, Jira, Slack
Role
Design Lead, Researcher
Duration
February 2022 – August 2022
Process
Discovery, Design, Testing, Release, Iteration, Reflection
Tools
Figma, UserTesting, Teams, Jira, Slack
Discovery
Establishing the Problem
Quick Report Identification: Make it easy for customer success managers and sales teams to quickly find the right report in Forrester’s service catalog. The goal is to let users access the reports they need with just a few clicks, saving time and boosting efficiency.
Access Check: Allow users to easily verify whether clients have access to specific reports. This feature helps prevent delays and ensures smooth access to the right information.
Cross-Published Research: Highlight research that’s published across multiple services and product areas. This makes it easier for teams to find and use research that covers different topics, promoting collaboration and making the most of available resources.
Meta-Data Transparency: Provide more detailed meta-data for each report, giving users extra context and insights beyond just the basic information. This helps them understand the research more deeply.
Establishing the Problem
Quick Report Identification: Make it easy for customer success managers and sales teams to quickly find the right report in Forrester’s service catalog. The goal is to let users access the reports they need with just a few clicks, saving time and boosting efficiency.
Access Check: Allow users to easily verify whether clients have access to specific reports. This feature helps prevent delays and ensures smooth access to the right information.
Cross-Published Research: Highlight research that’s published across multiple services and product areas. This makes it easier for teams to find and use research that covers different topics, promoting collaboration and making the most of available resources.
Meta-Data Transparency: Provide more detailed meta-data for each report, giving users extra context and insights beyond just the basic information. This helps them understand the research more deeply.
Introducing the "Access Verification" Tool
The access verification tool is used by customer success managers, analysts, and sales to verify access to specific Forrester services and reports. While it does reveal valuable pieces of data, the tool comes with some challenges such as overloading the user with a lot of information all at once since it was originally created to support product technology manage the services in the back-end. It’s also yet another tool on top of SalesForce, powerpoint decks, and internal notes to have to juggle, which increases daily workload.
Dependencies and Technical Limitations
Both the product catalog and taxonomy are non-modifiable for the purpose of this exercise. Reorganizing services, or modifying their taxonomy fall under a product-related initiative that is considered beyond the scope of this project. As a result, the primary emphasis is on surfacing existing information rather than reorganizing or cleaning up data sets. Additionally, introducing new meta-data fields is also not feasible.
User Interviews
Even though product owners possess strong surface level understanding of the requirements, moving forward without talking to the our users would not be ideal. As the primary targets of the new tool we need to identify the friction points straight from the source.
Discovering the Pain Points
Our interviewees are open about the challenges they’re facing in their workflows. To get a full picture of the issues across the organization, we reach out to a wide range of people, including sales reps, account managers, and team leaders. This helps us understand the problems at all levels of the company.
Shari
Sales Representative
1. Tell me about yourself and your relation to Forrester.
I’m a sales rep who has to identify research and reports in our product library in order to best guide and equip my clients with the most precise information.
2. What is the most important mission objective in your day-to-day tasks when assisting clients?
If I look at a report, I need to know where it exists, whether it’s priority specific, priority general, etc.? Answering these on the fly is the job.
3. How would you describe your past or current experience in doing these tasks?
I have to jump between different user group accounts, the access verification tool, salesforce, and the website to answer all these questions. It’s a lot of things to have up in the air for just basic product knowledge.
4. If you had a magic wand, what would remove friction? What would bring you joy?
If I can get all the information related to where a report lives in one view, along with related information, then it’s much easier to collect your thoughts and properly guide the client.
Ted
VP, Principal Consultant
1. Tell me about yourself and your relation to Forrester.
I work with sales teams exclusively, including all reps, executives, while partnering with financial clients.
2. What is the most important mission objective in your day-to-day tasks when assisting clients?
First thing I would look at is which persona the client sits in, and which adjacent services the report lives in. Based on these you can begin to infer the most optimal way through a guidance session.
3. How would you describe your past or current experience in doing these tasks?
Consulting is a process that you get to know and fine tune as you do it over a long period of time. Everyone does it differently and most have their own style. With Forrester, the challenging part of the job so far has been just how complex our offering is based on all the different seats. Consulting style won’t change that fact.
4. If you had a magic wand, what would remove friction? What would bring you joy?
Most of my work is preparation. I collect everything I need related to a topic and put it in a presentation file so a tool that can expedite how fast I can get everything together will always be welcomed. I wish there was a way to simplify the product and change the way we package it ultimately.
Justin
Sales Representative
1. Tell me about yourself and your relation to Forrester.
I’m an enterprise level sales representative that manages four client accounts which combine in just over two million CV. I’m the primary touch point for them even before they reach out to a CSM sometimes.
2. What is the most important mission objective in your day-to-day tasks when assisting clients?
Trying to figure out if they are not reading reports due to access related reasons. Second, I look at the client in SF to check their membership in order to confirm whether they would ever have a chance to read it under their current membership.
3. How would you describe your past or current experience in doing these tasks?
It’s not easy. It involves jumping through a lot of different windows and tabs to connect the dots depending on which client you are talking to. Each inquiry is unique and nuanced that you can’t stay in just one of the windows to answer all the questions.
4. If you had a magic wand, what would remove friction? What would bring you joy?
Sometimes I just wish I could see which services a report lives in from the report landing page without having to jump through three different portals. There has to be a way to streamline getting information from the access verification tool and salesforce into one location.
Brendan
Customer Success Manager
1. Tell me about yourself and your relation to Forrester.
I manage seven customer success specialists. The majority are aligned to premier user west and some premier user east, meaning the Americas and APAC.
2. What is the most important mission objective in your day-to-day tasks when assisting clients?
First thing I do is go to salesforce to check my client’s access groups. Then I make sure they have a user ID and are registered before I start tracing the reports through the product catalog from the access verification tool.
3. How would you describe your past or current experience in doing these tasks?
Given the volume of my team, it gets tough to swim inside salesforce and the access verification tool all day. Since the two aren’t linked to our taxonomy tool, any miss-tags or errors make it that much more difficult to verify and make corrections.
4. If you had a magic wand, what would remove friction? What would bring you joy?
An easily accessible and simple to dissect source of truth. We already know we have a complex product. We should focus on enabling the customer success team to simplify the way we present and package our different services through the value of reports, and we should be able to do that quick.
The interviews highlight a few key challenges for sales reps, analysts, and CSMs:
- Varied Roles: They handle a range of tasks, from managing client accounts to overseeing multiple teams.
- Client Support: Their goal is to quickly access and understand reports to assist clients without relying on tools like Salesforce and the access verification tool.
- Inefficient Processes: Users are juggling too many tools, leading to a complicated, time-consuming experience with navigation and taxonomy data errors.
- Need for Simplicity: Users want a simple, consolidated tool that centralizes report info, streamlines data gathering, and serves as a single source of truth.
In short, there’s a clear need for a more efficient, user-friendly tool that simplifies processes and improves the client support experience.
The interviews highlight a few key challenges for sales reps, analysts, and CSMs:
- Varied Roles: They handle a range of tasks, from managing client accounts to overseeing multiple teams.
- Client Support: Their goal is to quickly access and understand reports to assist clients without relying on tools like Salesforce and the access verification tool.
- Inefficient Processes: Users are juggling too many tools, leading to a complicated, time-consuming experience with navigation and taxonomy data errors.
- Need for Simplicity: Users want a simple, consolidated tool that centralizes report info, streamlines data gathering, and serves as a single source of truth.
In short, there’s a clear need for a more efficient, user-friendly tool that simplifies processes and improves the client support experience.
Design
Bringing It All Together for an MVP
We know things won’t be perfect right away—product development is all about improving as we go. Now that we’ve got a good handle on user needs and business goals, we’re ready to dive into designing. With the product catalog and big report library in mind, we’ll try out tabs and tables to keep everything organized and easy to use.
Design
Bringing It All Together for an MVP
We know things won’t be perfect right away—product development is all about improving as we go. Now that we’ve got a good handle on user needs and business goals, we’re ready to dive into designing. With the product catalog and big report library in mind, we’ll try out tabs and tables to keep everything organized and easy to use.
Preliminary Layout Variations
We want to strike a balance between making it easy to navigate lots of information and offering different ways to view it. We also want to add extra details that support the main content and help contextualize the presentation. We explore tabs as sections for different product lines, and tables as proverbial maps showing where each report fits in the larger product list.
One of the challenges is to avoid overwhelming users with too much info all at once. So, for the MVP, we organized tabs, tables, and meta-data into three main sections within a modal window to help users see these connections more easily.
The first exploration kept things basic to test how much info is enough. The second exploration added a bit more meta-data to see how users responded. The third focused on how the meta-data stood out, and the fourth was all about fine-tuning for long term scalability.
The Second Challenge: Unforgivingly Long Tables
On top of the already complex structure of the Forrester product catalog, there’s another challenge: the varying lengths of tables. The data a report pulls depends on the account tied to subscriptions. So, some users end up with access to a wide range of different research spread across multiple service subscriptions.
Finalizing and Compiling the First Prototype
For the MVP release, we wanted to see how users responded to different ways of interacting with the data. It allowed users to view all the report meta-data and see its location in the product catalog directly from the modal, pulling data from both SalesForce and the access verification tool.
This streamlined the experience by reducing the number of tools needed. Plus, the modal is easily accessible from the hero banner on any report page, providing a convenient connection.
Testing
Findings From the First Round of User Testing
For the prototype, we created a testing script to evaluate how users responded to the amount of data displayed and how easily they could determine report access levels within the subscription catalog.
As expected, testing revealed some challenges with terminology and overall clarity. Users struggled to identify the modal entry point on the page due to unclear CTA labels. Additionally, the tables did not effectively convey product access, leading to further confusion for analysts.
The key takeaways emphasize a key need to refine naming conventions, make entry points more prominent, and improve the clarity of information in the tables. These adjustments will serve as our north star in future iterations.
Updating the Designs
To streamline, we simplified a few things. First, we reworded the empty state message and access level restriction reasons were moved to a detailed landing page. Counters were also added to the tabs to indicate how many services a report is available under. The modal header now also includes clearer instructions on how to use the tool and that it’s for internal users only, and the CTA was updated from “View Report Details” to “View Access Details” and shifted away from the client actions to make it more prominent and actionable.
The Final Design Review
Before the demo with the product owners, we do a final check with the digital experience team to make sure everything looks spot on. Even with a smooth process, it’s always helpful to get a fresh set of eyes. After gathering feedback from the design team and making updates, we take a bit of extra time to tie up any loose ends before the demo.
Presentation Day with Product Owners
The big day is here. We present the final prototype to the business leads and walk them through the proposed designs. During the demo, we explaining the design choices and share insights from the user testing. At this stage, feedback is usually light, unless we’ve really missed the mark.
Documentation and Dev Pre-Flight
Release
Developer Documentation Hand-off
Bridging the Gap Between Design and Development
Bridging the Gap Between Design and Development
Bridging the Gap Between Design and Development
The Developer's Demo (to the Design Team)
A demo is scheduled with the design team and product owners in web-dev. There’s usually about a sprint between the demo and the production release to give the team time to prioritize and fix any design inconsistencies. Small fixes like margin updates, font sizes, and hover interactions are usually rolled in, while larger updates get versioned out in the next sprint release cycle.
Release to Production
The development team prioritizes and sequences out the release based on the outlined business requirements. A second, and if necessary, a third demo may be scheduled with the design and product teams if necessary. After the release, product makes an internal announcement to notify the user base and, of course, to celebrate.
Iteration
The Concept of Continuous Improvement
A key idea behind DevOps is iterative releases and continuous improvements, focusing on launching versions beyond just the MVP. This approach gives teams the flexibility to plan, scope, and roll out features more realistically. It also allows for testing between releases, keeping updates grounded in real data. This incremental approach helps get products to market faster than big, one-time releases.
Collecting Data for v2.0
We usually give the tool about a month of active use before reaching out to users to assess its impact. This gives them time to get familiar with it and start using it in their daily routines, which helps us spot any issues. During this time, we create a testing script with “agree” or “disagree” questions and some deeper probes to see if users can find specific data easily.
Our research goals right now are to:
- Assess the user experience: Identify how users interact with the tool and pinpoint pain points, confusion, or areas for improving usability and navigation.
- Evaluate the tool’s impact: Measure how it’s affecting users’ efficiency, productivity, and workflow, and see if it’s addressing the challenges we identified earlier.
Identify new requirements: Talk to users to uncover any new or changing needs that have come up since the initial release.
Further User Interviews & Note-Taking
Synthesizing the Findings
Since we record the user interviews, we can easily go back and listen to them for extra insights beyond what’s in the initial notes. Some common themes that came up in the second round of testing were a need for more clarity around the product’s complexity. Users also struggled to sift through the table to find the information they needed, which isn’t ideal, but is to be expected. We continue to iterate.
Updating the Designs and Documentation
The interface needs to do a better job of showing client access levels, especially in more complex cases like cross-product publishing. There’s also an increasing need to think about long-term scalability to make future updates smoother. A more stackable layout would be a great solution, as it not only supports scalability but also makes it easier to integrate feedback, especially when new features or design elements need to be added.
The Second Design Demo
The same development team that worked on the MVP release will get the demo of the updated layout, just like before, to keep things streamlined since they’re already familiar with it. We stick to a standard two-week sprint for rolling out updates.
The 2.0 Release
There’s about a month between the release of the MVP, and the release of v2, giving users plenty of time to acclamate themselves with the RPI and monitor how it can improve their workflows. It’s important to give them time to use the updated interface before we assess how things are going. We also post a new internal announcement highlighting the changes.
Success Metrics
Reflection
So What Have We Learned?
As we set out to deliver an enterprise-level consulting experience for our clients, we realized our internal team also needed enterprise-level support. Through internal interviews, a common challenge became clear—team members were struggling with multiple portals and tools for basic tasks. Constantly switching between windows and content was hurting their efficiency. To tackle this, we focused on consolidating everything into one centralized platform to simplify workflows. Along the way, we also discovered the need for built-in instructional tooltips and descriptive features.
The Key Takeaways:
- Unified Location for Efficiency: Keeping internal users in one place makes workflows smoother and more efficient.
- Struggle with Multiple Tools: Users struggled with juggling various portals and tools for simple tasks.
- Demand for Instructional Prompts: There’s a strong need for helpful prompts and educational features within the platform.
- Clarity in the Moment: Users appreciated features that answer questions and provide instant clarity.
Next Steps
As the tool becomes actively used we’ll focus resources on fixing any bugs or issues that come up. The tool’s design is built for long-term scalability, making it easy to roll out version 3.0 if needed in order to meet any new business needs. This flexibility allows the RPI to adapt to changing user demands and an evolving product catalog while staying stable and functional in the meantime.