Contextual Inquiry

Improving Communication for Salespeople

Research Question: TechSmith products were used by some salespeople, but not many. However, we knew that most sales people needed to communicate asynchronously in order to do their jobs. We wanted to know if there was something we could do that would better serve the sales market and allow us to expand into that space.

Plan: Recruit 10 participants in three states for a contextual inquiry study. I traveled to meet each participant in a location where they would normally work and spent two hours observing how they worked with both desktop and mobile devices.

What We Learned: It would take a lot more work than we initially thought to create something that would make a significant difference for salespeople. The work they needed to accomplish it and the space they needed to accomplish it in was significantly different from our main customer base.

Outcome: Ultimately, it was decided not to continue down this path and to continue focusing on potential customers who shared more similarities with our current users. The research helped us determine that this wouldn’t be a fruitful space to invest our resources and resulted in saving significant time and money.