Press release management system

Arybe was developed with the goal of replacing external platforms and tools that the company used to subscribe to for press release operations, aiming to reduce costs. However, the system had very low adoption among the employees.

To understand this use case, it’s important to know how the main user journey/flow inside the app is:

We needed a cheap and fast way to find out where we should dive in to investigate. So we ran a quick survey and collected some insights:

1. 0% satisfaction rate;
2. ‘Contacts’ and ‘Mailing lists features stood out:
   • 55% of the users pointed them out as problematic features;
   • 49% of the suggestions written in the open question had to do with them.

Before the survey we had installed Microsoft Clarity in perfect timing so that by the time we were analysing the survey results, we already had enough data in Clarity to compare to. And the data confirmed ‘Contacts’ and ‘Mailing lists’:

• Were the top visited pages, showing how they are important features and need to work smoothly;
• Had several user session recordings that showed friction points.

We didn’t have the approval to interview users individually, but we decided to invest in a qualitative research round, in group: we brought them all together in a meeting and were all ears.

Users shared their screens, showed us how they actually use the system, and most importantly: helped us understand the root causes of problems and which ones should be prioritized. It was the very first time users had space to be heard, so it was a very dense meeting.

What they said confirmed the importance of the ‘Contacts’ and ‘Mailing lists’ features, but gave it a whole new meaning: they are the basis of the system's main user task (sending Press Releases) and impacts the entire user journey from end to end.

Contacts should be manipulated with flexibility across all other features.

As a result, we combined all the research done so far in a mixed methods approach and created a roadmap/backlog list of 16 initiatives.

This backlog was done in 4 months.

After working on prototypes for most of the identified initiatives, we conducted usability and A/B tests to validate the proposed solutions. The main improvements shipped addressed new concepts to enhance usability:

1. 1. Shortcuts for managing contacts throughout the system and integrations between the Contacts and Mailing lists modules

   

2. 2. New filters and bulk actions in the Contacts list

   

3. 3. Resending and forwarding press releases to new contacts

   

About a year after the first survey, we ran another one and compared the results.

The main goal, which was to increase adoption, was reached succesfully: The base of frequent users increased by 500% in 8 months.

Satisfaction increased significantly, but we are currently investigating why it’s still low, so that adoption is not compromised in the long term.