Unmet User Needs

Challenge 

A senior product person learned of an important user pain point— they knew solving this friction would be profitable and wanted more information about how much effort it would take to spin-out a service (using data they already had) to would meet a previously unmet user need. Our client asked us to document this pain point, strategize a solution, and build a new prototype from scratch. 

Approach 

The development team at our client had been instructed the lift to transition to REST design (as opposed to SOAP) APIs. We were asked to interview developers with SME in the company’s IT architecture and strategy so that we could help the product team innovate with development work that was already complete. We identified three core areas of data being generated by usage of the consumer application and helped the client to design an API strategy to develop, document, and provide tangible access to the end-user thru various project management tool interfaces of their choice.

We met with seven users and held collaborative design sessions in which we charted their business processes on a Miro board, including the process fit for an ideal, imagined state product. All interview subjects described similar frictions with the same or similar softwares and companies related to their desire to process payment records for insurance policy binding.

Results 

Ultimately, these API strategy for this “product” went on to become the entire strategy for this product— a third party retail system that connects two other discreet systems and displays a recognizable process indicator. We worked with the client to understand which technology strategy would be required to develop a product that meets this need, the cost of development including sales, legal, marketing, etc.

We documented a hypothesis and then researched with the key users to determine if the idea would work— we built a prototype that started to show these people how their idea would actually work. We created two imagined state product workflows that helped the end user solve the workflow problem of distributing a refund of a traditional payment method (like a physical check) using their existing retail insurance agency tech stack.