New Product, new research approach?
With Celonis’ launch of the Intelligent Business Cloud in October of last year, we introduced a number of new capabilities to our software and moved from a process analytics-focused software towards a holistic business transformation solution. The biggest architectural change that we faced was the move from an on-premise software to a cloud platform.
To our company, the decision to make this transition was of high strategic value as it enabled a drastically decreased time-to-value, i.e. the time it takes our customers to find first insights with our software. From the perspective of a user experience designer and researcher, not only did this mean major changes came about architecturally and product-wise, but along with this came other exciting opportunities and challenges:
- For years we had no real-time insights on key performance indicators (KPIs) like adoption, retention, number of users, session duration, logins, etc. The data was locked in on-premise environments that belonged to our customers. With the Cloud, this is no longer the case as we can employ user analytics to understand our customers’ journeys better.
- From a business perspective, our new products (like the Action Engine) were the next logical step towards operationalizing business transformation. We developed these features in close collaboration with pilot customers to ensure we are solving the right problems for them. However, these new product offerings also presented Celonis with many additional user types that we had only basic knowledge of.
So, we decided that in order to design the undefined user experience of our customers and drive the adoption of our newly introduced products, we needed to establish a user research approach that allows us to delineate both the expectations our customers have of our software and how they currently interact with it.