Check out our White Papers
Learn how Indeemo can support your research projects and generate rich, contextual insights that help you better understand your target audience and build empathy across your entire organisation.
Using a mobile Diary Study with screen recording to conduct in-context UX research of a B2B SaaS mobile app
“There’s an app for that” used to be the running joke for a while back when the App Store burst onto the scene. As technology continues to integrate into every aspect of our everyday lives, there now seems to be an app to manage and organise everything and every device in our lives.
Increasingly, such innovations are appearing in the B2B SaaS space where more and more SaaS vendors are porting their legacy desktop offerings to native mobile apps in order to provide more utility to their increasingly mobile customer base.
SaaS solutions offer businesses of all types and sizes the ability to manage their day-to-day tasks and activities in a more organised and efficient manner. The key benefits of a good SaaS platform for B2B business users are crystal clear: increase productivity by quickly taking care of routine tasks leaving more time to focus on growing their business.
The challenge: how to remotely conduct in-context UX research for a B2B mobile app
When our client approached us, they had recently developed a mobile offering which allowed their business users to communicate more effectively with their customers over mobile.
But understanding the user experience of their software for B2B clients and business users was proving a challenge.
Their analytics showed them that engagement in the first 24 hours was very positive but tailed off rapidly leading to a high churn rate.
The analytics were great at showing them when users churned. The problem was, the analytics couldn’t explain why.
As the product management team increasingly came under pressure from the business, they turned to their user research team to understand why.
The Goals: conduct UX research in context to understand churn
Our clients goals were to:
Understand how B2B users interacted and exchanged information with clients on a daily basis
Gain an in-context insight into the user experience of their software in a B2B setting - how and when users interacted with their app and for what purpose.
Use Mobile Screen Recording to identify areas of their mobile app that could be optimised and improved to make their users more productive.
Get an insight into why their churn was so high
As was to be expected, gaining in-person access to their users as they went about their daily work was near to impossible as the app had an international user base and the users were extremely busy and hence difficult to pin down to a particular date and time.
Our client knew that even if it was possible to bring their customers to a remote location or a UX lab to test their new app, it would in no way reflect actual, real life, day-to-day use in a B2B setting.
Furthermore, with a user researcher standing over the shoulder of their B2B users, they would only obtain a snapshot of their user experience which, given the presence of the UX researcher would again not necessarily reflect actual usage.
24 Respondents
12 Tasks
2 Weeks
Tasking Strategy: Scheduled Tasking
The Solution: a mobile UX Diary Study with screen recording
To get a deeper appreciation of the everyday lives, context and experience of their B2B users, our client opted for a Mobile Diary Study with Mobile Screen Recording enabled.
By utilising a UX Diary Study, our client was able to get a more contextual understanding of the everyday working need and behaviours of business users across multiple countries. In doing so, Mobile Diary Studies offered a pragmatic, cost effective solution to the near-impossible task of bringing this time-poor demographic to UX labs to conduct user testing.
Our client used a Qualitative Recruiter to recruit 24 respondents across 3 different countries matching their target personas. Respondents in each country were tasked to keep a diary of the apps and tools they used to communicate with clients on a daily basis. (Read our guide to online
In week 1, Respondents were tasked with keeping a diary of how and when they communicated with their customers on a day to day basis. Using a combination of screen shots with captions to track every communication (screen shots enabled our client to see which apps and technologies the users relied on, when the communications took place and why the users chose each mode of communication) and mobile screen recording, our client was able to baseline existing usage of communication apps among their target audience.
In week 2, the client then introduced their own app and used Indeemo’s Mobile Screen Recording capability to record their entire mobile user journey from searching for their app online to downloading the app, to registering and that critical first interaction.
“By utilising a UX Diary Study, our B2B SaaS client was able to get a more contextual understanding of the everyday needs and behaviours of business users across multiple countries concurrently.”
Daily tasks were then assigned to get respondents to record every time they communicated with their clients and again which apps they used. Daily Mobile Screen Recording tasks were assigned to capture core use cases for their own app and record each interaction. Screen recordings of up to 10 minutes where respondents narrated each interaction were then used to compliment user analytics and give the UX team a full stack understanding of what the users did, when, why and how they interacted with the app.
The result: understanding the why behind analytics and logs
The UX design team was able to work in collaboration with the analytics team to compare activity logs with the timestamped screen recordings from Indeemo. This not only allowed them to see what users were doing, but crucially why and how.
The in the moment narration of their B2B users was invaluable in helping the product and engineering team better empathise with the users and their needs.
The other unforeseen output was that they were able to capture the context in which users were using the apps. In one market, a higher than expected proportion of the interactions took place outside the office. Given that the mobile network in that market wasn’t very reliable, unstable network connectivity proved to be a significant contributor to churn.
If you’d like to learn more about how Indeemo can help you understand the UX of a niche communications platform, please get in touch.
Let us support your next UX Research project
Indeemo has been used successfully for pre-tasking and post-tasking across a wide range of industries in both B2C and B2B contexts.
Diary studies can last as little as 1 day or can go on for many weeks.
Clients consistently tell us how much more productive their face-to-face sessions are as a result of getting to know respondents through Indeemo before they meet in person.
