MicroStrategy Cloud Intelligence

UX Case Study

Long Story Short

COVID-19 has changed the world we live in. In this contactless world, the vast majority of interactions with customers and employees have to occur virtually.

Hyper.Now™ is MicroStrategy's all-inclusive SaaS offering for HyperIntelligence™, which raised its subscription revenue by 41% and reduced the deployment time from days to under 5 minutes. With that, all configurations and manipulations can now be done virtually.

Date

Jun 2020 - Sep 2020

My role

Product designer, UX Researcher, Coordinator

The Challenge

Content Disclaimer:

To comply with my non-disclosure agreement, I have omitted confidential information in this case study. All information is my own and does not necessarily reflect the views of MicroStrategy.

I know we've done pretty good, but...

MicroStrategy released HyperIntelligence™ in 2019. Users can receive critical data insights with zero-click for specific keywords via HyperIntelligence. According to Gartner, it is the most innovative product feature to appear in the ABI platform space in the past two years.

However, there are things that can be better. ↓

🤯

1. Complex deployment experience

The deployment requires a series of efforts, including installation, configuration, provisioning, connection, and card creation. It also requires the substantial expertise of MicroStrategy and BI architects

💸

2. Barriers to higher adoption

Departmental buyers and influencers need a "land and expand" model to prove new technologies before purchase. Connecting to the slow-moving Enterprise BI platform slows agility and adoption.

🦠

3. The challenge from COVID-19

Traditionally, sales/support engineers need to work on site with customers. In the contactless world, the vast majority of interactions with customers and employees have to occur virtually.

Below: A example of a small production deployment

To overcome the challenges and turn them into opportunities, I joined a small group on a holistic solution called Hyper.Now™. As a UX designer and a coordinator, I collaborated with three scrum teams and each group's designer/PMs.

High-level business objectives

  • Largely reduce deployment time
  • Expand to the new audience
  • Embrace the digital/virtual wave

High-level design objectives

  • Make it easy to start the journey
  • Reduce the friction for new users
  • Make it easy to expand adoption

Create a Vision

To further understand our goals, I built a user journey map of the current end-to-end data analytics flow. This map demonstrates how complicated and time consuming the process is for an end user to access the analytics from scratch.

Below: A user journey map of data analytics

Derived from the map, I saw some potential enhancements:

Use Cases & Experience

According to our findings and objectives, we sorted out all the essential scenarios to initiate the design. Below are some of the critical use cases.

1. Easily start the HyperIntelligence journey

I collaborated on an end-to-end workflow with the Marketing, Cloud, and Workstation teams to guide our design. To make it straightforward for new users, I streamlined the enrollment process.

Homepage & Registration

For potential users, the homepage provides an overview of HyperIntelligence to learn why they need it. Users can compare among different plans and easily start the free trial with a few clicks.

Onboarding Experience

After users install Workstation, they are taken to a knowledge base, where they can learn how they can use Workstation to leverage HyperIntelligence for their business.

Design collaborator: Jin Yan

2. Efficiently expand adoption

To expand HyperIntelligence adoption in customers’ organizations so that potential customers can easily try it, I designed an end-to-end experience for subscribers to share and collaborate with others.

Invite users

Environment administrators can invite users and give them appropriate roles.

Receive invites

When invited, the invitees will receive an email. They can access corresponding applications based on their roles.

3. Add more touchpoints

In Hyper.Now™, email is an essential touchpoint for users to learn how to use HyperIntelligence and get the status of their environments. Also, it is a portal to convert these free trial users to paying customers. To understand the jobs to be done throughout the process, I created an end-to-end flow of emails shown below.

Based on the end-to-end flow, I created the email templates shown below. In the initial release of Hyper.Now™, only the welcome email and the weekly digest will be sent to users.

The Impact

With the launch of SaaS offering Hyper.Now, we have dramatically expanded the market reach of our product – not only to new prospects but also to targeted, departmental deployments for our existing customers.

"I'm really excited about Hyper.Now. It's built on a world-class SaaS framework, and it's going to allow us to deploy HyperIntelligence to a dramatically larger number of entities in a faster, more accessible way."

-Michael Saylor, MicroStrategy Founder, Chairman & CEO

41%

of the subscription revenue has been raised

5

minutes

from deploy to use HyperIntelligence

What I've learned

Coordination and collaboration across teams isn't an easy thing. Overall, I am satisfied with how we put the holistic solution together, considering the short timeframe.

In this project, I learned a lot from MicroStrategy’s marketing and tech support teams. These teams have a lot of experience working directly with customers. We received great feedback from them regarding onboarding customers, subscription plans, and emails in a meeting that was way too brief. If I had had more time, I would have liked to involve them earlier for a more thorough review together.