How I turned research insights into product experiments to establish a new market for the Workiva platform.
💼 Role: Founding Principal UX Designer
🗓️ Dates: Jan 2019 – Oct 2020
👥 Team: Sr. Product Manager, Sr. UX Researcher, Lead Engineer (starting Aug 2019)
🚀 Stage: Discovery to Launch
🔏 Note: This project was conducted under an NDA. Most of the visual artifacts from this project are not allowed to be shown. The selected images shown here were approved by Workiva’s Legal Team.
Challenge:
Differentiated Capabilities with No Dedicated Engineering Team
Sales and product marketing identified a new global market which had many similarities with the established markets Workiva served. They came to Product with a list of feature requests.
A Sr Product Manager, Sr Researcher, and I (Principal UX Designer) were assigned to better understand the users and create a product strategy that aligned with both the overall platform strategy and sales’s needs.
Given Workiva’s solution based sales model, customers would have to purchase an additional license to include their Statutory Reporting processes in the platform. Naturally, customers were frustrated by the idea of paying more without seeing any differences in the product. We needed to identify ways to differentiate the GSR solution from the main platform to show increased market specific value.
How We Faced It
Conducted open-ended generative research to discover jobs and opportunities for improvements. Included on-site interviews and observation. (Collab between UX Researcher & me.)
Identified key product themes of opportunities to provide differentiated value. (Multiple presentations by me.)
Prioritized quick wins and experiments (see Example Experiment) given limited engineering resources. Made scrappy (often non-code based) Proofs of Concepts and prototypes to test value prior to engineer work.
Coordinated more than 7 different product teams’ roadmaps to deliver an end-to-end solution on the newly refactored platform for new customers with one starting key differentiation from the legacy platform.
Collaborated closely with Sales & Product Marketing to tailor go-to-market strategy and demos with what would be available in the product as features were being released.
Bi-weekly product reviews to share real time updates on work going on across R&D to sales and marketing stakeholders. Translated features into specific user value to ensure new features were quickly integrated into sales demos. (Organized and run by me)
Insights → Experiments → Features
Generative user research unveiled multiple areas where the Global Statutory solution could provide value beyond the standard Workiva platform. Here are three examples.
Multi-language Reporting
Research Insight:
Until automated translation could provide the same quality as human translators, users were not interested in it for translating filed reports. We discovered an opportunity to improve the experience of reviewing the numerical accuracy of reports when a collaborator was not fluent in that report’s language.
Product Experiments:
Language Support Page: There was quite a bit of inconsistency in how Workiva was talking about Language Support between sales, product, and customers. I worked to track down exactly what support meant and then collaborated with our Content Design team to build an intuitive support page to get everyone on the same page. View page here.
AI Translation for Reviewers Proof of Concept (see below)
Evolved Into Features:
Set Locale & Defaults: Allows users to see all language options in the application, as well as set locales and default formats for their document that impact formatting and spell check.
AI Powered Translation: Makes reviewing reports in a different language easier with in-context translation panels, send translation for review, and comments across translation aggregated on the original document.
(limiting to sharing what is currently publicly available due to NDA)
Global Consistency & Local Flexibility
Research Insight:
Workiva’s Linking features were a massive improvement in maintaining consistency, where users could update at the source link and have that change go across dozens of documents. However, Linking wasn’t designed to support flexibility creating additional burdens.
Product Experiment:
Link Reports: We discovered an internal API that could push Link network information into a CSV format. With permission, I took the raw CSV data from a few customer accounts and manually turned it into multiple different Excel reports for them to review and provide feedback. This allowed us to see how they were linking their documents and what data they actually cared about.
Evolved Into Features:
Link Placeholders: In the same Link, use the same language with region specific data dynamically included. (“Ex. In {{year}}, revenue {{increased/decreased}} {{percent}}.”)
Link Overrides: Instead of breaking the Link, users can indicate an override to customize the language. They are notified about updates to the Source and can choose to adopt the new language or not.
(limiting to sharing what is currently publicly available due to NDA)
Expert-provided Resources
Research Insight:
Global Statutory teams are often small and covering a large number of regions. While they have expertise in a few of regions (example UK & Ireland), if their company grows to regions outside their knowledge, they will lean into resources from their auditors, usually the Big 4 accounting firms.
Product Experiment:
Templates POC: For the annual R&D hackathon week, I partnered with an engineer to build a proof-of-concept of the technology and interaction for bringing a template into a Workiva account. That ultimately turned into a proposal to the Executive Management team that turned into a staffed team.
Evolved Into Feature:
Template Marketplace: The Workiva Marketplace was launched in June 2021 for the entire platform. It is a way for partners to advertise their content and services. It also helps customers discover best practices and start new reports more easily.
(limiting to sharing what is currently publicly available due to NDA)
Example Experiment: AI Translation for Reviewers
Insight - Jan 2021
How might we improve the experience of reviewing the numerical accuracy of reports when a collaborator was not fluent in that report’s language?
Ideate - Jan 2021
Whiteboarding session with Engineering lead.
Proof of Concept - Feb – March 2021
Built a Panel that allowed user to select text in document and translated it via AWS’s translation engine in 1 week. (Was visually rougher than this image.) Turned on in Development Partner accounts for feedback and utilization monitoring.
Final Feature (Help Pages) - May 2021
From feedback, we built out richer end-to-end send translation for review journey. Included sending a translated document to reviewers, allowing reviewers to comment on their automated translation, and having those comments appear in the original document.
Impact of This Work
The strategic vision work along with research around our experiments lead to the founding of two dedicated engineering teams to advance the reporting localization efforts and the Workiva Marketplace.
The differentiated language capabilities was a key deciding factor for the largest contract in Workiva’s history, as they wanted to do a multi-solution, multi-national platform roll out. They were also listed as key deciding factors in three additional large contracts in summer of 2020.
“We plan to accelerate our investments in global statutory reporting… Our early go-to-market efforts have validated three important factors: demand for our solutions in this marketplace, our product fit and the lack of significant competition — all of which are contributing to encouraging sales activity… Growth in subscription and support revenue in 2020 was attributable mainly to strong demand and better pricing for a broad range of use cases, including …global statutory reporting…” Workiva 2020 Annual Report
User satisfaction metrics (CSAT, adoption, qualitative comments) also indicated an increase of user value and increased retention for existing users.
