🧠 Product Design
🥳 User Experience
🔬 Research
I joined the Xinova team right as work on the new platform was kicking off. For context, Xinova finds innovative solutions to tough R&D problems by leveraging their network of 20k inventors and innovators. When I joined, the decision had been made that a new platform was needed to facilitate and smooth out the process. I worked on all aspects of the platform, including our submission and authoring tools. This case study will focus on a Q&A feature I designed to handle the large influx of questions and to help the Xinova managers speed up their replies while keeping their answers accurate.

Before we get into the details and talk about my process and what did (and didn't) make it, here's a quick video demo of the final feature as seen on the live app:




Xinova Terminology



RFI


A Request For Innovation made by a company based around a R&D problem.


Innovation Manager


Internal term for a Xinova Project Manager who worked with a customer to draft a RFI. THey would then manage the review and selection process, and work as the point of contact for inventors/innovators.


Solution


The proposal submitted to solve the problem presented in the RFI by an inventor.


Platform


The new Xinova React web app.

The Problem



Xinova Gen One was a fancy file dropbox built on top of SalesForce. Users would download a word template, work on it offline, and then submit their completed document. They would then wait for an Innovation Manager to accept their submission for review or provide feedback. They would then be emailed about acceptance or rejection.

Xinova Gen Two is a react app that has authoring, submission, and review all built into the online platform with integrated notifications and messaging. It drastically lowered the bar for entry and increased submissions 5-6x from a wider array of Inventors with very broad skillsets. This led to a new issue: overload.

Since we now accepted submissions from non-experts, it led to a dramatic increase in questions via email. These questions came in two different waves: immediately upon publishing or the day before the opportunity closed. The Inovation Mangers quickly became overwhelmed, which led to a series of other issues - Innovation Managers would spend hours a day answering emails instead of focusing on customer manageent. Since there was no way to track the reply in context of the request, they also routinely lost track of who they had already replied to (or missed) and the information given out lacked consistancy.

These issues delayed inventors research/writing time and led to unnecessary rejections. Our Innovators quickly began voicing their complaints and we realized we needed to move quickly before the issue got out of hand.







So What Can We Do?



We found ourselves in a tricky spot - we needed a solution quickly, but with the platform being so new we had no baseline. Since research wasn't really possible, I decided to plant a flag and target the obvious and known problems to see if we could get some movement. It was determined that the easist thing to do was to add a FAQ section. Goals being:

  • Reduce the quantity of email received by our reviewers
  • Standardize the replies
  • Make questions and answers easy to find
  • Communicate in app when a question has been asked or answered. No more email!


Iteration One: FAQ



We quickly added a FAQ section to our authored RFIs. Innovation Managers would answer questions and update the published document accordingly. The results where mixed...


The Good





There was a small bump in submissions and inventors submitting and made the answer publicly available on the RFI. It also allowed Reviewers to quickly answer a question once by updating the FAQ.


The Bad






While there was small reduction, the FAQ feature didn't have a meaningfull impact on the amount of emails and Innovator confusion. I quickly realized we needed use this first pass as our baseline and begin testing and iterating.

Iteration Two: Q&A




Flag planted, I now had a baseline to start doing some research. Overall, I ended up conducting a series of interviews, usability studies, and a a few rounds of surveys - sent to inventors as well as Innovation Managers. The results proved to be very useful:

  • While the FAQ stopped a small number of initial emails, it still was a blackhole. Users didn't seem to realize that their answer would be in he document and a large percentage of Inventors would just email again if they didn’t get a direct reply. Innovation Managers ended up emailing most people back anyway.
  • We discovered Inventors ignored most content on the page that wasn’t the request documentation, so they missed the FAQ entirely
  • No way to alert/notify an inventor when their question had been answered outside of replying with an email… so they’d email again
  • We also discovered that sending a personalized email to a Innovation Manager was a scary thing for a large percentage of our new Inventors
  • But, for our expereienced Innovators, they loved the conversational aspects of email. We realized that this was the key - We needed to add functionality that would facilitate the dialog



New info in hand, I started by building out a series of user flows to dial in the process. I wanted to work outward from the know issues, with the biggest being trust in the system and visiblity with questions and answers. To do this, my intitally focus was on how Inovation Managers would answer questions.


Q&A Flow







Step 01: Submission





Users can post a question about the RFI


Step 02: Reply





The innovation manager can review and either add an answer or remove the post if needed. Innovators cannot comment on each others questions - prevent misinformation or trickery. Once they post a reply or remove the post, the innovator is notified via the platform


Step 03: Response





In the original designs, we wanted a way for users to show if it was helpful or not. This ended up being pulled due to concerns of bad behavior - It was determined we needed to further research the feature.


Based on the flow, I built a clickable prototype in Principle. Letting users click through the process provided a ton of information and gave direction on which features to cut. For example, we removed the voting for V1 and took Q&A out of it's own tab to increase visibilty.





Final Design



The final design, as it appears in the platform. The Q&A feature is fixed position, with independant scrolling. This lets user scan the document while referencing or askign a question. We simplified the designs and built everything within a week.




Final Results



Big bump in submissions - Users seemed to have more confidence submitting. The number of inventors per RFI increased by a healthy amount. The number of emails DRASTICALLY dropped and users started using the notification system to sped up the replies.




Other Findings



  • You will always have a set of people who will email - we knew going in that zero was impossible, but we shot for it anyway and didn’t limit the design
  • Feedback from the Innovation Manager was less stressed overall
  • Major concern - Overall, users where polite and appropriate - averaged less than 2 removals per RFI, and 0 overall removed for inappropriate content
  • The superstar Inventors loved posting questions as a way to intellectually flex in front of others
  • Based on follow-up interviews and surveys, Inventors in general had a higher level of confidence in their submissions, since they felt it was a level playing field - I.e. other person no longer received a better answer then I did


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