Microsoft Teams Onboarding: Competitor Analysis & User Research
Week 2
To ensure that our design efforts were directed at the Microsoft Teams user, we needed to understand who the user was (Goodman, Kuniavsky & Moed, 2012). This is where user research came in, and we began with a quick ‘family and friends usability test’, conducting nano-usability tests whereby we created a new Teams account and asked those we live with to go through the current onboarding process on the app while we observed (Goodman et al, 2012). This provided instant feedback and an insight into what users expect from an onboarding experience on mobile. We therefore learned early on that users want a quick, straightforward tour around Teams, without the ‘childish’ animations that currently accompany the Teams onboarding.
To get a better understanding of who our audience is, a questionnaire was created on Google Forms and was distributed amongst friends, family, colleagues and classmates. It gathered basic demographics to understand the age and gender of those who use collaboration platforms like Teams, but also asked open-ended questions so that those who had used these platforms could express how they found the experience of learning to use them (Preece, Rogers & Sharp, 2015). The answers reiterated what came up during the nano-tests — that users want quick, ‘uncluttered’ tours. They do not want the onboarding to be a marketing strategy and just want to be shown how to use the features they need.
Personas were developed to communicate the research gathered and these helped ensure that design decisions were made based on user research, rather than on what Eeva Ilama calls the ‘elastic user’ (Illama, 2015). The personas gave a voice to the Teams user, while empathy maps allowed the motivations behind the user’s feelings and actions to be articulated (Calabria, 2004).
To better understand where Teams stands in the working-from-home market, a competitor analysis between Teams and its main rivals, Zoom, Slack and GoToMeeting was conducted (Curry, 2020). A search on the App Store discovered that Teams has the lowest rating of the four apps. It also has received the lowest ratings in terms of ease of use, allowing speculation that the other apps offer a better onboarding experience for new users.
In his article, ‘The 5 Best User Onboarding Examples’, Jackson Noel sites Slack as the first example of a product that offers a good onboarding experience (Noel, 2020). Both Slack and Zoom adopt a gradual engagement approach, allowing the user to get an idea of what the platform has to offer before signing up. Discovering strategies that work for other platforms in the industry allowed the group to look into adopting similar strategies for the re-design, so that Teams can ultimately gain a competitive advantage (Babich, 2017).
Through user research and competitor analyses, the group was now ready to design a prototype that would meet the needs of the Microsoft Teams user.
Reflections
Who did what?
- Nano-usability tests — All members.
- Created user research questionnaire, personas & empathy maps — Celine.
- Conducted competitor analysis — Iwona & Celine.
Challenges Encountered
Due to the time constraints of this project, the user personas and empathy maps were based both off the user research and competitor analyses, but also off our own personal assumptions. This weakened the accuracy of our personas, impacting our confidence in the design’s ability to meet the needs of the user.
The onboarding experience was chosen as an element to redesign before the questionnaire was distributed, and the majority of the questionnaire respondents who use Teams said they actually found learning how to use the platform quite easy. The project was too far along to change route, but this showcased that our own assumptions did not necessarily reflect the needs of the users.
References
- Balboni, K. (2020), ‘How to shorten time to value with better user onboarding’. Retrieved 15 October 2020 from https://www.appcues.com/blog/time-to-value.
- Balboni, K. (2020), ‘5 Ways to Personalise Your Onboarding Experience’. Retried 15 October 2020 from https://www.appcues.com/blog/user-onboarding-personalization.
- Calabria, T. (2004), ‘An introduction to personas and how to create them’. Retrieved 12 October 2020 from https://www.steptwo.com.au/papers/kmc_personas/
- Curry, D. (2020), ‘Microsoft Teams Revenue and Usage Statistics’. Retrieved 10 October 2020 from https://www.businessofapps.com/data/microsoft-teams-statistics/.
- Goodman, E., Kuniavsky, M., & Moed, A. (2012), Observing the user experience: a practitioner’s guide to user research (2nd ed.). Morgan Kaufmann.
- Ilama, E. (2015), ‘Creating Personas. Retrieved 14 October 2020, from https://www.uxbooth.com/articles/creating-personas/.
- Noel, J. (2020), ‘The 4 Best User Onboarding Examples’. Retried 14 October 2020 from https://www.appcues.com/blog/the-5-best-user-onboarding-experiences
