CARBONITE
Getting Buy-In for UX
The problem
When I joined Carbonite, the product line was in a very sorry state. There were two primary problems:
Very poor UX - Both the consumer and business products suffered from very complex experiences that had not been designed well. There was very little help or guidance, and the copy was confusing. This was exacerbated by the fact that, by nature, people primarily tend to interact with backup software at times of high stress (needing to recover lost files), so issues getting the product to work were extremely frustrating. This was a particular problem in the Consumer business, which, because of its scale, saw an overwhelming number of support calls driven by UX-related issues.
Wildly inconsistent design aesthetic - No two of the products the company offered look even remotely alike. Even the Windows and Mac versions of the same product looked and worked completely differently. You always want some consistency in a product line, but with Carbonite you often have users interacting with two or more products (e.g. backing up both Windows and Mac machines, using the desktop product to back up and the web portal to manage your account, or an IT admin using Desktop and Server backup products) so it is critical to have some consistency between them.
Though these issues were obvious to me as I reviewed the products and reviewed research, support calls, and usage data, they were unfortunately not well understood by the business at large. At the time, the company was prioritizing new features and new products over this sort of maintenance. So the first challenge was to rally the business and get buy-in to invest in fixing these issues.
The project
It wouldn’t be enough for me to stand in front of the leadership team and explain the issues. They needed to experience these problems the way customers would. So I proposed that every executive at the company (there were 16 at the time) go through a usability session with my research team, to put themselves in the shoes of our customers in a visceral way.
The team agreed to try it. Each of them, from the CEO on down, spent 2+ hours in a lab we set up for this purpose. They performed tasks like installing our software, configuring it, and (crucially) trying to restore lost files.
It was truly eye opening. Many of them had not experienced the software first-hand, and they all struggled to perform the basic tasks because of the many UX issues. In our conversations afterwards, almost all of them said they would not consider purchasing our software if they had been an actual prospective customer.
The results
After everyone had completed their sessions, I followed up with a presentation to the executive team summarizing their experiences and feedback. I also presented designs that illustrated the vision for what we could do with investment here — improved UX and consistency across the product line. I proposed a “Year of UX” where teams would spend a significant amount of their time addressing these issues and bringing the vision to life.
Agreement was unanimous, and you’ll see some of the work we accomplished in the “Year of UX” in the following project pages.
A slide from my presentation about this initiative
A slide from my presentation about this initiative
