Reimagining the New User Experience

In a recent post, Kristin Zajac from our marketing team referenced customer survey results that indicate “ease-of-use” is the primary reason people recommend QuickBase to friends and colleagues. These promoters also tend to be the people who build multiple, feature-rich applications. But what about new users that are just dipping their toe into the QuickBase pool of possibilities? Turns out, we have an opportunity to make the transition from “first-time user” to “enthusiastic problem solver” much easier. This is also beneficial to the businesses that are our customers because more employees creating productivity-boosting apps with QuickBase means greater ROI for their organizations (Pssst…we don’t charge by app).

Based on these insights, we’ve set out to reimagine the first-time user experience of QuickBase. Being a part of Intuit gives us an enormous advantage in any redesign project. At Intuit, we use a system called “Design for Delight” to create or reimagine a product, service or specific experience that puts the customer at the center of the process. Alex Hastings from our marketing team discusses this in a post about Intuit founder Scott Cook’s advice on leadership. Design for Delight goes a little something like this: brainstorm hundreds of ideas on how to solve a single customer problem, whittle them down to the few best, and then build prototypes to rapidly test hypothesis with users.

For this project, the QuickBase team just completed a Design for Delight session pictured below where we generated 156 ideas on ways to improve the first-time app creation experience! We whittled it down to the 11 most promising directions, did some rough sketches, and presented them to an internal panel. From there a smaller team narrowed it down to three distinct models of how to improve the customer experience.

We are now in the process of testing these concept wireframes with customers to see how well they help people to orient themselves within QuickBase and quickly locate the features they need to build an app. In the coming weeks we will be incorporating that first round of customer feedback and building interactive prototypes to gain detailed insight on real-world use.

We will continue to refine the concepts and look at how to implement them. Stay tuned here for our next steps. If you are interested in participating in our research for this project and others, please feel free to sign up.

About Rob Keohane

As Senior User Experience Designer, Rob's goal is to make using Intuit QuickBase easy and engaging.