Experience Sampling

Supporting Asynchronous Communication

Research Question: We knew that some of our customers used Snagit on a regular basis to support asynchronous communication throughout their workday. What we didn’t know was how frequently a typical office worker needed to communicate asynchronously and what they were communicating. We believed that learning this would allow us to adapt our product development to more easily support asynchronous communication in work environments and adapt our marketing to better convey the benefits of using Snagit for this type of communication.

Plan: We decided to recruit approximately 30 participants for an experience sampling study. Over the course of a few weeks, we sent participants text messages (using a program called Simple Texting) throughout the workday. Each text asked them to record the last time they communicated with someone who wasn’t in the room with them, how they did it, and what they communicated.

What We Learned: Most of our participants used asynchronous communication frequently throughout their day. Many of them had the same use cases as our current Snagit users (and some were already using images to communicate), they just weren’t using Snagit. We discovered several opportunities to improve Snagit to better fit this style of communication and we also learned more about the language participants naturally used to describe this style of communication.

Outcome: The results of this study were shared with both the product development and marketing teams. By learning more about people who were similar to our customers, but weren’t yet our customers, we discovered both how to adjust our product development to meet the needs of a broader group of users and how to change our marketing to better communicate with those potential users.