How Plunet transformed their
user research with consider.ly
Plunet started its business journey by implementing user research practices into design sprints. In consequence, every feature idea had to be tested with real users before implementation. The scope of Plunet’s research is very broad — reaching from generative research for better understanding their users to evaluative research.
About Plunet
Leading business and translation management system Plunet “BusinessManager” provides a high degree of automation and flexibility — applied by professional language service providers and translation departments. Plunet has more than 60 employees in total, of which 3 people are Experience-Designers.
Challenges
The first research project of Plunet led to a rocky road: Without a structured process and no capable tool, support research can get hectic. Weeks before the final design sprint presentation, offices at Plunet’s were covered in interview transcripts printed out on paper — and heaps of post-its. Obviously, keeping track of the information and cross-check them between the different interviews was way too hard.
The actual analysis process was time-consuming and only delivered benefits for this one particular project. Connecting the dots of their analysis was only manageable via post-its — plus, insights which had vanished in MS PowerPoint reports. Any additional and deeper knowledge gained during the research got lost after this point.
All of the Plunet researchers realized the need for a tool able to guide them through the analysis process — but also offered a way to store their findings in a shareable, structured, and easy to understand way. Jesús Espuña, UX designer in this team, began to look for different research tools and UX repositories to help Plunet streamline the analysis process and maximize the impact of their UX research.
How consider.ly transformed Plunet’s research
Plunet’s decision to use consider.ly — enabled Plunet to structure their research process in one single tool.
A structured tag taxonomy — that could be used across research projects — was established within the consider.ly, using the tag manager. The result was a tag overview and tag groups — now providing a common understanding of the analysis process. Additionally, consider.ly enabled various stakeholders outside of the design team to better understand, observe and follow the research.
On top of that, access to the user research data was transformed. In the past only the design team had access, now the research findings and insights were easily shared across the company – fostering communication and buy-in.
As a noticeable effect after multiple studies, the analysis process got significantly faster, thanks to the lightweight tagging UI of consider.ly.
In the process, old research data resurrected, with help of consider.ly’s tagging feature. When new research is conducted, it takes Jésus and his team just a few clicks to cross-check — using the more mature research.
Plunet already used the cross referencing tags to enrich their user personas with research findings from multiple studies. Through cross referencing they linked notable parts of an interview directly with a user persona. Therefore, every person in the company not only had easy access to the user personas — but could also dive into the underlying research and interviews to acquire more empathy towards their customers. Thanks to consider.ly, the complete body of data and research knowledge from different projects is shared — in one space.
consider.ly enabled Plunet to develop a structured research process with easily shareable findings within four months.
Next Steps: Further Progress
Plunet started using consider.ly constantly right from the start. Jesús uses it almost daily and made consider.ly an integral part of the Plunet research process. Until now, Plunet created more than 80 notes for interview data. They structured their data with over 3.000 tags – a great UX research repository that led to over 30 new insights.