Adaptive

Need: Adaptive’s decades-old products were loved by IT professionals tasked with managing customer datastores, yet alien and unapproachable to everyone else in customer organizations. Mounting customer attrition and rising costs had made a radical turnaround urgent, and new management brought us in to lead it.

Approach: Our team shaped a 4 month engagement to deliver against three goals: one, identify what the problem and opportunity areas were; two, strategize, design, and build a customer product our client could premiere at an industry event in 3 months; and three, make next-step recommendations Adaptive could work with to improve their existing product experience. The team was myself, another hybrid designer/researcher, our project’s developer, and the consultancy’s owner.

Who are the users, what are their needs, and where’s the value?
We worked with Adaptive’s customer support and sales staff to identify users at customer sites whose needs spanned the breadth of metadata creation, governance, and consumption. We later worked with Adaptive SMEs and stakeholders in a 3-day harvesting workshop to synthesize what success for Adaptive could look like. Identifying what the value of which parts of the product were, and to whom, was our primary objective; with “What can we do, now, that could matter?” a looming question.

Putting the ASAP brakes on customer attrition
With a new understanding of user needs to weigh against early stakeholder ideas, the team regrouped to design and build the showcase demo. The data mapping that Adaptive’s tools executed was impressive, but a self-evident wow that could quickly resonate with a few thousand conference attendees—and an experience they could trust to be real, deliverable code—needed to come from a public experience with live data.

The Financial Industry Business Ontology (FIBO) is an open-source, public datastore the team pulled from to build an open, simplified search experience. Cognizant of the reputational risks with vaporware, it felt important to showcase a tool that any audience member could open and play with, themselves, on their own mobile devices. The delivered code was such that any customer’s datastore could be easily swapped-in from the public-facing FIBO datastore, so that our client was set up to succeed in rebuilding customer trust, after the event had concluded.

The public FIBO experience has since been pulled, but I was incredibly proud to link-out to it from here, while it was live!

Demonstrating quick, user-centric value in practice
After design had completed our work on the FIBO Search experience, Adaptive’s management asked for some guidance on their existing products. They could afford a slight extension of the current engagement, but needed to secure funding to cover more significant efforts. They had also just wrapped with a different agency on an overhaul of their brand, so we trusted they were serious—and went to work.

We studied the existing product against what we’d already learned about customer needs and crafted some immediately actionable low-effort/high-impact recommendations. Regaining trust from customers fatigued by a history of broken promises was an urgent need, and visually-evident changes to just the front-end were an inexpensive way to persuade investors that new management was on the move in the right direction.

Finally, we created a scrappy “Future State” proposal by assembling a handful of rough screens to demonstrate how key functionality that meets the needs of a majority of users could be reshaped to fit within a modern application framework. Our goal was to simply open management’s eyes to possibilities—while also arming them with a user-centric vision towards the future, rooted in the evidence of our research efforts.