PC User Journey
How many PCs have all of us owned in our lives? PCs being a mature category, we often thought of user journies as encapsulated in the purchase cycle in my research department, rather than as journies of discovery of the device itself. However, Intel and the rest of the industry cycle in siginificantly new capabilities into the PC from time to time, and my team asked ourselves “how do users go about adopting a new feature set on an otherwise familiar product?”
01 Background and Goals
This was an important question to ask in the 2010s, as Intel began to roll out a set of new features that could be seen as a response to some of the innovations Apple had introduced to connect together Mac compatable devices for media and file sharing like Airplay and Airdrop. Intel’s technology was called WiDi, as we were asked to identify the issues leading to its poor reception. We also wanted to build a framework for enabling feature onboarding which we could apply more broadly to upcoming launches.
02 Methods
We wanted to capture users along all stages of the laptop acquision process, so we recruited 50 respondents who were within a month of purchasing a Mac or PC laptop. All respondents were administered surveys and given “missions” using the dScout mobile survey platform. We also a conducted in person “shop-alongs”.
In the interviews we tried to capture the process for both Mac and PC buyers discovery, adoption, and mastery of new features. We gave some of them assignments to educate themselves about Airplay (Macs) and WiDi (PCs). We also used card sorts to capture their emotional state at each stage of the process, and asked them to make mental maps of both their journies as well as the touchpoints along the way they used for assistance.
Finally, we did a recontact interview with respondents to capture both their experiences with the new technology, as well as to unpack their “remembered experience”.
03 Insights
We were able to diagnose pretty quickly that the launch of WiDi was not going as planned: though the software itself was reasonably usable and scored well in lab tests, hardly any attention had been paid by the product team to the holistic user journey.
Unlike our previously successful launch of wifi and the Centrino experience brand, hardly any attention had been paid to the user journey of acquiring at setting up the component parts that constistuted the experience. Centrino made it clear to the user that you needed a Centrino-branded laptop with wifi installed as well as a wireless router to access the internet wirelessly. In public, you needed to look for a “wifi hotspot”, the proliferation of which Intel had also subsidized. In the case of WiDi, none of that “experience infrastructure” was in place (see right).
With the insights from the journey maps and analysis of touchpoints we were able to show to the team where users had expected to be guided along their journey of trial and adoption, but weren’t. We used this to create a framework of touchpoints to guide future experience design and launch support activities.
As we were working on the findings of this project, we also contracted the design firm R/GA to do some benchmarking on onboarding best practices. We combined this with our research findings in a workshop whose output was a set of design patterns for internal software teams to use.
04 Actionability
Some of our recommendations requiring work with the ecosystem, such as in-store demos and creating a “works with Widi” badging program for peripherals, took a while to implement.
More immediately, the PC Experience Design team started work on an onboarding utility called the Intel Experience Center, which would be pre-loaded as a Windows 10 tile on new PCs and would introduce users to new features on their systems.
05 My Learnings
UX as Systems Design - Up until this point, the work of our internal design team (and my research team as a support function) had been looking at user experience in terms of discrete features and capabilities. This project caused us to broaden the scope of our thinking to the context of the entire PC ownership journey, as well as to collaborate more closely with teams like developer relations and partner marketing.