How Labster prioritizes which user problems to solve next
Background
Labster is an award-winning science learning platform that offers educators a catalog of immersive virtual lab simulations which are proven to transform students from disengaged to inspired and prepared. The team of over 350 employees has raised $147 million to date and serves millions of students through 3,000+ educational institutions around the world.
Challenge
The more tailored Labster is for each educator’s use case, the more immersive the experience is for their students. But every new educator that signs up for Labster comes with their own unique context that the platform must adapt to.
Until now, the only way educators could tailor Labster was through the interactive quizzes at the end of each lab simulation. With limited resources, Labster’s Product Management team had to figure out which customization opportunities would have the most impact on the greatest number of educators. The challenge was, where to start?
Process
Tudor Cristian Bogdan, a UX Researcher at Labster, was tasked with finding the right answer to this question.
He started by running two internal workshops at Labster — one with Account Managers to gather customization problems from existing customers and one with Sales Executives to uncover problems raised by new users. Through these workshops, Tudor gathered a bunch of pain points and feature suggestions that later turned into his list of customer problem statements.
Before jumping into active research, Tudor identified the three key questions he needed to answer:
Which problems are customers most keen to solve?
How often do customers experience or consider these problems?
How does a customer’s use case influence the problems they’re most keen to solve?
Based on these objectives, Tudor created a ‘Customer Problem Stack Ranking’ survey on OpinionX that he shared with 1000 Labster users. Users were shown Tudor’s problem statements as a series of head-to-head pairs and their votes were used to calculate the relative importance of each problem statement. Alongside this ranking exercise, Tudor included questions about problem frequency and use cases so that he could later split out the ranked results to compare the priorities of different customer segments.
Results
Tudor’s survey results revealed three surprising insights:
The problem they expected to rank highest ended up finishing in 17th place!
An opportunity emerged as a top priority for customers that the team had not expected.
The highest-ranked problems varied significantly depending on the customer’s main use case, which allowed Tudor to focus on the problems that were most important to Labster’s best-fit customers.
These results proved to Tudor how crucial it is to understand the importance of users’ problems, not just whether these problems exist:
“We already knew what our customers’ common problems were, but we didn’t know which ones were most important to them. We had never asked them to compare the importance of these problems before. Having a set of problems prioritized by our users was the game changer that OpinionX enabled.” — Tudor Cristian Bodgan, UX Researcher at Labster
Tudor’s research went on to inform multiple roadmap projects for the product team and changed how he now thinks about customer feedback and feature requests:
“The survey results helped me demonstrate to the broader team that the loudest voices are not always the most representative customers — just because you’ve got a very loud customer complaining about something does not mean they represent your broader customer base.” — Tudor Cristian Bodgan, UX Researcher at Labster
Getting the right kind of data
Company growth is about a lot more than just identifying and solving customer problems. You’ve got to know (1) which customers are your most important segment and (2) which problems those customers are most urgently trying to solve.
“As a rapidly scaling company, almost anything you do will move the needle, but this research made me realize that solving certain problems moves the needle a lot more than others.” — Tudor Cristian Bodgan, UX Researcher at Labster
If Tudor had just blindly trusted that customer feedback accurately represents what the entire customer base cares about, he would’ve caused Labster to pursue the wrong priorities. Or he could’ve opted for a bunch of user interviews to find patterns in user problems, but at a scaling startup like Labster, you don’t always have time for that. OpinionX enables Tudor to rapidly leverage Labster’s existing knowledge about customer problems and turn that into real data to identify the problems that are most impactful to solve first.
Create your own customer problem stack ranking survey like Tudor’s today with OpinionX — a free research tool used by thousands of product teams to rank and segment their customers’ top pains, preferences, and priorities.