Cacoo, a Diagramming Tool: Journey Mapping
Background
Cacoo is Nulab’s diagramming tool. It’s utilized to make visuals like flowcharts, relational charts, and wireframes.
At the time of this project, Cacoo was a 10 year old product that was starting to show its age. Its aesthetics were dated and its interface was confusing and clunky.
At this time, stakeholders were looking to modernize and improve Cacoo in a major design overhaul.
Goals & Deliverables
Early conversations with stakeholders, revealed a lack of solid understanding for Cacoo’s users, their context around diagramming, and what they need in a diagramming product.
Before jumping into a redesign, we set up an exploratory study to find out more and provide a starting point of data to investigate further.
We specifically aimed to answer:
What does the end-to-end journey of users engaging with diagramming software look like?
What needs and challenges do they have along the journey?
and aimed to deliver:
Journey Map
Needs & challenges / Product opportunities
Product direction
Future areas of investigation
Participant Recruitment
20 participants were recruited for this study. To ensure we collect high quality data, user attributes unique to our user base were used to screen for appropriate research participants. The recruitment dimensions below were leveraged to screen and recruit the right mix.
Behaviors
Customer Type
Occupational attributes
Demographics
Since this project intended to collect insights describing broad areas, screening criteria were kept broad. To partake in the study, research participants only needed to:
Have a legitimate use case for using diagramming software
Be employed or be recently unemployed
Fielding Research
I moderated 20 research sessions, each lasting one hour. Interviews were conducted in-person and remotely.
In preparation for interviews, a discussion guide was created following the discussion format below.
User Interviews: Exploration of Users, their journey, needs & challenges, and other context
Research began with user interviews, designed to gather background details about each person and the context in which they diagram. Each interview explored the topics below, uncovering data around each participant’s goals, motivations, challenges, physical environment and social environment.
Their role and job responsibilities
Their company’s products and services
Their team’s structure and dynamics
Work scenarios that lead to diagramming
The purpose of their diagramming
Needs that they have while diagramming
Challenges that they face while diagramming
Usability Testing: Understanding Current Usability Issues
Participants later transitioned to the “behavioral” portion of the study in carrying out the tasks below. This allowed us to observe how well Cacoo addressed each participant’s goals, motivations, and challenges and led to a preliminary list of design issues.
Creating & Styling Diagrams
Exporting Diagrams
Managing Diagram Canvas Attributes
Saving & Managing Stored Diagrams
Stakeholder Alignment
While interviews and testing were conducted, stakeholders observed live or at their discretion via recorded sessions. For each session, stakeholders captured data by taking notes about what was discussed.
Session Debrief
Following each session, a session debrief was held to begin building our journey map, leveraging data from each research session.
Workshops
Following the completion of all the research sessions, a workshop was held to review the entirety of collected data and complete the creation of our journey map.
Key Findings: Identifying Underserved Needs
One part of the journey in particular, was key to identifying underserved user needs and informing new features.
At the time, it was obvious that diagramming was a core phase of the user journey, but after conducting this research, we realized that we were missing a bigger story.
Visualizing Ideas
In that bigger story, the first thing we realized was that Diagramming wasn’t just creating a flowchart or some other diagram, but it was a way for users to visualize some work related idea or concept.
So for example, if the user was an IT person, perhaps they were tasked with making adjustments to the hardware network. In that scenario, they used diagramming as a way to illustrate their solution.
Sharing & Presentation
In continuing that story, they then might need to communicate their solution to a broader team. So they took actions like:
Sharing access so that their colleagues could view diagrams
Adding diagram images to reports & slide decks, again to share access with their colleagues
And using the presentation feature, to share their diagram in a group setting
Viewing & Collaboration
The last thing that we learned about this story was that users often revisited already created diagrams to:
Reference for some later work
Continued to actively discuss it, sometimes leaving comments for others to see
So in deepening our story of the user journey and adding these 2 latter phases in particular, we revealed product opportunities that became core focuses in evolving the product.
Key Findings: Usability Opportunities
In terms of the interface itself, 2 themes appeared during research that also guided the products future direction.
Navigation
The first theme had to do with navigation issues. When participants were asked to create a diagram, they had struggled in getting past initial steps.
They couldn’t discern how to engage with the interface, because the buttons were small and some icons didn’t communicate their functionality well.
In addition, the menu in its entirety was complex., There were 3 menus with various buttons, making it difficult to sort through.
Look & Feel
The second theme had to do with the aesthetics of the interface.
Participants often expressed that the interface looked and felt old.
One person said that it looked like Windows XP.
Also, some expressed to the effect that the old aesthetics created negative expectations and turned them off to wanting to use the product further.
So in addition to surfacing the underserved needs mentioned earlier, this research also helped us to uncover these usability related product opportunities.
Summary & Deliverables
By the end of this project, I was able to facilitate interviews and subsequent answered the following questions:
What does the end-to-end journey of users engaging with diagramming software look like?
What needs and challenges do they have along the journey?
Delivered data & insights along these following areas:
Needs & challenges / Product opportunities
Product direction
Future areas of investigation
And provided the following tangible deliverables:
Low and high fidelity journey map
Next Steps
This initial project was a great, first step for an organization that had very little understanding of what their users experience while diagramming. The journey map and the learnings it contained provided a robust overview that helped identify product opportunities and guide future direction. Following this project, we focused on investigating those opportunities further.