Breakthrough Academy
Background:
Breakthrough Academy, an online community and education platform that helps small business leaders in the trades manage their business and employees, had invested a significant amount in an interactive platform for their members with ineffective results. Sixzero was approached to redesign and develop the platform in a much more user-centered way and asked Curio Research to partner with them on the project to elevate the research intended to inform the new design.
Proposal:
Curio Research proposed a 2-phase process. The first phase would focus on understanding what owners and managers need and expect from Breakthrough Academy systems. The second phase would be testing high-fidelity prototypes with a new set of owners, managers, and employees to ensure the design concept resonated with the intended user base before investing in a complete design and development of the new system.
Execution:
In Phase 1, Curio Research interviewed eight business owners who were also experienced Breakthrough Academy members and 8 of their employees with management responsibilities. The interviews discussed the participants’:
Usage of Breakthrough Academy programs and applications
Any pain points related to employee hiring, onboarding, management, training, and retention of employees
Reactions to pre-identified concepts aimed at addressing these pain points.
In Phase 2, we used the prototypes developed by Sixzero based on the findings from Phase 1 to conduct eight design concept testing interviews and four asynchronous design tests. For this phase, we recruited four business owners and four managers for the interviews and got three employees out of the four. We wanted employees to use an app to test the prototypes on their mobile devices using a research/testing app asynchronously at their convenience.
For this concept test, we asked participants if they could interpret the dashboard and data correctly, execute and understand preidentified key actions using the interface, see themselves using the system regularly, and if they had recommendations to improve the design before Breakthrough invested in implementation.
Challenges:
The biggest challenge we faced during the research was with recruiting. Tradespeople are notoriously busy, and no incentive amount would entice them to join a research interview. Luckily, Breakthrough Academy members get a lot of value from its in-person services and resources, and they wanted to see the Breakthrough Academy online services be just as good. For Phase 1, the CEO insisted on handling the participant recruitment via his assistant, which we advised against, but we did our best to work with them to fill the participant quotas. Recruiting went slowly, which stretched the research timeline for the interviews from one week to over a month. Incentives were also mishandled due to the departure of the CEO’s assistant during the research.
We remedied these shortcomings in Phase 2 because the CEO allowed the lead researcher to handle most of the recruiting. We provided the CEO with a Google Form to collect the contact information of interested Breakthrough Academy members and business owners. We began communicating with those who responded to schedule interviews and see if any of their managers and employees would be interested. By letting the researcher manage the recruiting process, we reduced the interview window to 1 week and delivered the report promptly.
Results:
Curio Research kept the audience firmly in mind when delivering the results. The end clients were busy tech startup executives, and the SixZero team were user interface designers who cared deeply about what users needed, what features did or did not work, and why. We presented research insights for both phases in a precisely structured Google Doc so readers could use the outline navigation to jump between sections depending on their interests.
We presented the executive summary in a table format instead of bullet points to give the designers an at-a-glance digest of the recommendations identifying the issue, recommending a solution, and explaining why it was likely to work based on the research. Each recommendation was linked to the specific insight in the main report in Google Docs to easily access more information.
Phase 1 gave the Sixzero design team and the stakeholders at Breakthrough Academy a foundational understanding of what features owners, managers, and employees would require to adopt a minimum viable product (MVP). Not only would the MVP need to give users easy access to Breakthrough Academy templates and historical documentation, it would also need to facilitate two-way communication between supervisors and employees, help owners understand their hiring needs, and maintain employee engagement by assisting staff in adopting best practices, learn new skills, understand their organizational structure, and know their potential career pathways. Mobile compatibility would also be an absolute requirement.
The research from Phase 2 forced Sixzero to completely rethink the application's structure to make it more intuitive and simplified. It also made the team at Breakthrough Academy think beyond their focus on a minimum viable product to consider moving a more holistic data integration to a more prioritized position on their product roadmap. This integration would provide more value to their customers and incentivize regular usage by business owners and their managers.
