Research & Design Case Study
This case study steps through a product design project where generative research achieved its intended goals and revealed an unexpected opportunity with ~$6M ARR potential.
Background
CentralSquare offers multiple public administration products. Many customers subscribe to more than one of those products. In 2018, in collaboration with product and engineering stakeholders, I led a small team in an initiative to create a shared portal through which a user could have a single sign-on (SSO) experience accessing any CentralSquare products that the agency licensed. This portal would provide a dashboard landing page and ability to navigate into any licensed applications.
The project was called Public Admin Suite Pro and the portal called Workspaces.
Generative Research
The design challenge was to create dashboards for the various personas that would be entering through Workspaces. The goal of the research project was to understand what the various personas would need to have at their fingertips in this dashboard.
Methods used for this research included:
- Site visits to customers using each of the product
- Contextual inquiry and shadowing for each of the target personas
- Additional virtual interviews and follow-up as needed to complete the study
Research Analysis, Design & Development
The research project achieved its goals of defining functional dashboards for the various personas. Multiple dashboards were designed for specific personas in each of the suite's applications.
The design team mocked up multiple dashboards and navigation features for specific personas of the suite's applications.
Design and development started in Q4 2018 leading to the first release of Workspaces in Q4 2019.
But the analysis revealed more than what we were looking for...
Hidden Discovery
Sentiment and comments from the 24 interviews and shadowing sessions revealed commonality with regard to taking payments from the different products in the suite.
The cashier might need to process separate payments in each system to complete the customer's transaction.
Paying bills for customers with multiple accounts could be very complex and time-consuming.
What if...
...the cashier could process all payments from any account holder on one screen?
How much more productive would that make them?
Would the experience for both the cashier and customer improve?
How could this become a source of revenue for the company?
Business Plan
Building a Common Cash Receipts (CCR) application was certainly possible, but what would the ROI be? Is the improved experience for users and customers enough? How can this be turned into a profitable venture for the company?
Improving the experience would have a positive effect on overall customer sentiment about the products they use and be valuable in the long term, but very hard if not impossible to measure.
Consolidating payment processing into one system opens an opportunity to increase usage of the company's payment processing engine which was not supported by all the individual applications in the suite.
We estimated that the new CCR product would process one million transactions over the first 3 years and after 5 years have the potential to process 6.3 million transactions annually. That's ~$6M in ARR.
Generative Research
Generative research for the new product included interviews, shadowing and competitive analysis. The concept of Fast Batch, a transaction entry screen optimized for mailed in payments, was born.
A set of feature requirements was established for the first release, but investigation continued to inform features that would build a more robust, market friendly product in future releases.
Design Iterations
Using the CentralSquare "Cordon Design System", patterns were established to deliver improved experiences compared to legacy products and as-good or better speed for completing a transaction.
Benchmark single payment transactions from legacy products could be completed in less than 30 seconds with an average of 18 keystrokes and no mouse interaction.
Design Evaluations
Usability testing revealed very high marks and favorable comments from users across legacy products.
Development to First Release
The first release of CCR achieved a better-than-benchmark efficiency. Cashiers are able to complete a single payment transaction in less than 15 seconds with an average of less than six keystrokes and no mouse interaction.
The Fast Batch feature, optimized for entering mailed in payments, reduces time per 100 transactions by 25%!
Continuous Improvement
Adding features like payments to/from trusts and deposits, multi-currency support and multi-language support opens new markets and sets CCR apart from legacy products adding even more value.
In 2023, this public administration-focused product branched across to our public safety products when CCR support was added for our records & jail modules. It was the first CentralSquare product that truly bridged public administration and public safety functionality, increasing the annual transaction potential by an additional 10%!