Ooma Office Manager Full Case Study

Note: all content is shared with the permission of Ooma Inc. Names are changed and faces are blurred for privacy.

This was my first full project with Ooma and as a UX Researcher.  This was the single longest project I have been involved in during my time at Ooma, lasting 2 years. I learned a great deal about interviewing and interacting with customers to ensure they do not feel pressured and become willing to share information. I also learned the value of having non-UX team members participate in interviews, as our customers gave plenty of insights not directly related to UX that were captured by my fellow product team members.

We set out initially to answer the following questions:

• Why were some Ooma Office customers returning their devices?

• Why were some Ooma Office customers calling support during setup?

Early product returns, or “infant churn” is very hazardous to a product’s success, and repeated calls to support drive negative customer reviews and word of mouth. To gather insights into why these issues were happening, we recruited three customers who had bought an Ooma Office system in Los Angeles, but had not set it up yet. Meet our first customer “Diego”:

“Diego” wanted to use Ooma Office in a way that we never thought of. He wanted to run both his printing shop and bail bond service on the same service, with two different phone numbers. While having multiple phone numbers was an option, we never thought of the need to have two organizations on one system. And of the two other studies we did, none wanted to use Ooma in a way my superiors considered a standard customer experience. To clarify, the product team had assumed our customers would be using Ooma Office in a cubicle-style office setting. The users were interviewed were “Diego” in his print shop/bail bonds agency, “Mary” in her home office, and “Richard” in his athletic studio. Names are changed and faces are blurred for privacy.

Learnings

All three 2-hour interviews showed the same problem: our web portal, called Ooma Office Manager, was difficult to work with. It did not offer enough options to set up the system in one go, and settings were difficult to find. Our customers are busy people. They don’t have time to poke around a website. They need to get set up and get straight to receiving phone calls. In particular, none of our interviewees wanted to use our “Virtual Receptionist” features that allows routing of calls to certain parties. They preferred that all calls directly ring their phones. This demand was not known prior to this study and was a revelation that would inform future design decision for the Ooma Office Manager portal.

After typing up and rating a list of further user needs and pain points for a revised Ooma Office Manager, we were ready to begin redesigning the site.

After working with the product team to understand the greatest pain points, I worked with the web team to create a revised UI that featured greatly improved navigation/IA and an expanded help menu to assist users in configuring their Ooma Office system.

With the prototype complete, I then organized a usability testing plan to validate it and make any necessary iterative changes. Along with my colleague Nandhini, we recruited eleven Ooma Office customers to preview the prototype and collect feedback. We used Zoom web conferencing software to allow customers to share their screens with us so we could observe them interact with the prototype.

Users were given a selection of the following tasks:

• Add a user

• Change hold music

• Create a web conference room

• Change what user a phone number will ring when the system is first called

• Initiate the process to port over a phone number

• Update Virtual Receptionist greeting

• Enable our Virtual Fax service

• Create a ring group (where several users are called at once)

I set a high bar of a 90% task completion ratio for this research project. Because of the difficulty users encountered in the previous iteration of Ooma Office Manager, I wanted to ensure the product was as easy to work with as possible to minimize both calls to support and product churn.

Users were strongly encouraged to think aloud as they worked so we could learn both their feedback as well as their thought process as they used the web portal.

Out of 11 sessions, there was a marked success with navigation of the new UI. We had an average of one task difficulty per user, most of which were resolved via hints instead of outright instructions. Users were able to navigate the revised UI and complete tasks we asked of them.

This research project was a success. However, the team still needed to consider those who are either new to the service, or not as tech savvy. Users are going to be busy with their businesses and typically won’t have ample time to dig deep into understanding the website. Thus, we needed to continue to ensure Ooma Office Manager is as first-try accessible as possible.

We took two approaches to this issue. Firstly, the team created what we call the “Express Setup Assistant” a website wizard that guided the user through each step of creating and configuring an Ooma Office account, from selecting a number to adding and configuring user extensions. We validated our design using UserTesting.com. Because the study was unmoderated, the results were rockier, due to technical issues both on our end and UserTesting.com. Ultimately, the product team managed to get several successful run-throughs of the express setup assistant by writing detailed instructions for the remote testers. If I could go back and do this part of the study again, I would bring external testers to our usability lab and have a fresh Ooma Office account for each of them to go through while I observed, versus relying on unmoderated studies.

Secondly, we created a tool for Ooma’s salaried telephone sales team to pre-configure a customer’s Ooma Office account during the sales process. The sales representative would create all necessary extensions and user accounts for the customer. The hardware would then be shipped to the customer, resulting in a plug-and-play experience.

How did the redesign do?

Due to confidentiality agreements, I cannot share exact numbers. However, calls to support were sharply reduced, and Ooma Office’s NPS score was strongly improved due to our efforts to improve the above aspects of the Ooma Office experience.

Special Thanks to Thad White, VP of Product, Dennis Peng, VP of Product, Nandhini Raghunathan, Senior Product Manager, and Mark Maxwell, Director of Product, Ooma Office, for all their assistance and guidance with this project.