case study #2

In 2007, RightNow identified the need to establish a position as the undisputed best of breed eService leader and invested in a 2 year Development effort to rewrite their flagship product, the Customer Portal (CP). I served as the lead Usability Engineer on this effort and directed research initiatives to ensure that our efforts resulted in the best customer experience possible.

During this project, I bootstrapped a usability laboratory and process for recruiting and paying participants, and then served as the principle investigator for the user research. In order to effectively support the team, I led with multiple research techniques spanning from formative ethnography in the early stages of the project towards summative testing towards the end.

After two years of hard work, our team achieved wide-reaching success:

• RightNow was renamed a leader in eService in the Gartner Magic Quadrant.
• Visitor abandonment reduced by 60%.
• Self-Service success rates increased by 30%
• CP has been used to design the support experience at clients such as Zynga, TiVo, VirginMobile, and Orbitz.

Additional reading

• UXMatters.org article
• Summit Conference 2009 Presentation
• RightNow white paper (PDF)