Pinnacle Systems

Project Details

Phase 1: Marketing and Business Assessment

This phase formed the business context for the project and thus helped us to develop the design for the listening labs in Phase 2.

Steps included:

• Corporate strategy review. As a first step in building the business context for the project, Creative Good reviewed Pinnacle’s corporate and ebusiness strategy, as well as past and present Web-based initiatives.
• Internal stakeholder analysis. Because the organizational and cultural challenges are often the biggest barriers to change, Creative Good interviewed key stakeholders and managers to assess the organizational perspective and uncover critical viewpoints and internal challenges.
• Marketing and customer review. Creative Good reviewed market research already conducted, and any other needs assessment or customer segmentation analysis.
• Expert review. Creative Good conducted an expert heuristic analysis on the current process and evaluted competitor strengths and weaknesses.
• Performance and usage metrics. Creative Good analyzed current site performance, usage metrics and other behavioral data.
• Listening lab setup. Creative Good conducted the preparations for the listening labs. This included reviewing customer segmentation, creating a screener, creating the lab design, scheduling the facility and recruiters, and identifying key stakeholders to invite to attend.

Phase 2: Listening Labs

Creative Good’s version of user tests, listening labs combine the best of traditional usability research and less directive market research methods.

• 16 customers (website users) participated in one-on-one sessions, each lasting 45 minutes, followed by a discussion among the client team members observing from “behind the glass.”
• Analysis of the lab results showed, as it often does, the “why” of the Phase 1 analysis. Customers’ behavior clearly showed why they often weren’t able to find the information they needed.

Phase 3: Creation of the Customer Experience Strategy

Creative Good developed a simple high-level strategy to guide the rest of the redesign project, based on everything that had come before in the project: business analysis and expert review, stakeholder interviews, data analysis, listening lab results.

Phase 4: Prototyping

Creative Good created 8 pages of “wireframe” prototypes to show, tactically, how to implement the customer experience strategy in the redesign.

Implementation

As stated above, Pinnacle Systems measured results after the relaunch, which included Creative Good’s recommended changes:

• 80% increase in sales conversion rate
• 30% reduction in homepage exit rate