The problem

As Pearson shifted its focus to digital courseware, they struggled to get instructors to switch their teaching materials over from the traditional print textbook. This resulted in several problems:

• Sales of digital products were struggling as we relied on instructors to adopt courseware for their classes

• Sales reps spent a lot of time troubleshooting tech issues for new instructors. Curiously, we also saw a very large amount of duplicate instructor accounts, which also meant that support teams spent a lot of time finding and merging these accounts. This indicated a potential issue with the onboarding experience.

Solution overview

Research setup

I focused on the following areas for this research:

• Understanding the current onboarding experience and understanding pain points in the process

• Understanding criteria by which instructors evaluate courseware, and identifying gaps and opportunities in the current sales process

To this end, I started by shadowing sales reps on their sales pitches’ with instructors, and also interviewed instructors who had recently adopted our products. I worked with sales reps to map out the current experience in a journey mapping session and discuss pain points and opportunities in their process, and then launched a survey to instructors to quantify the findings from the qualitative research.

Field visits

I shadowed sales reps as they visited instructors and demoed new products. This allowed me to see the sales process in context, and see how instructors wanted to evaluate the courseware before making a decision. I realized that sales reps often left these visits with plans to follow up by creating a “demo account” for the instructor to play around with.

Interviews

To better understand the varied attitudes and behaviors of instructors, I conducted a series of 13 remote interviews with instructors from a variety of backgrounds. I found that most of them had similar experiences working with sales reps to set up demo accounts so that they could better evaluate the software. Currently the courseware had no built in capability to demo or sample a product, and setting up a “trial” course for an instructor was very time-consuming on the part of the sales rep and ultimately did not allow the instructor to fully see the capabilities of the courseware. Incidentally, it seemed as if these “demo accounts” were the root cause of the many duplicate or abandoned instructor accounts.

Journey mapping workshop

After the initial research, I conducted a journey mapping workshop with our design team and a group of local sales reps to map out the sales process and identify opportunities to improve the process.

Through this, we discovered that a huge pain point for both instructors and sales reps came from inability for instructors to sample a product, resulting in sales reps spending a lot of time creating accounts and setting up sample courses. Aside from taking valuable time away from sales reps to set up accounts, this also resulted in the creation of duplicate accounts or forgotten accounts, and ultimately left instructors feeling like they don’t get a full picture of the software.

Survey

Having discovered these pain points, I sought to uncover the prevalence of these issues so I launched a survey to 200 instructors who had recently adopted digital courseware. The survey findings, which indicated just how common it was for sales reps to demo products in this way, highlighted a huge pain point in our adoption and onboarding experience and made it clear where to focus product efforts.

Outcome

Research findings

From this research, I discovered three main findings:

1. Instructors are skeptical about switching to digital, and want to try out the product extensively themselves before giving it to their students.

2. Instructors can easily become frustrated by course setup, and right now, there is no way for them to sample a product without setting up a course from scratch.

3. Sales reps spend a lot of time and effort creating demo accounts and courses so that instructors can try out a new product. Unfortunately, these demo accounts don’t fully encapsulate the functionality of the product, and instructors don’t have the resources they need to evaluate the product.

Journey map

I synthesized findings from all these research activities into a journey map. This was evangelized around the company, and our design team and product owners were able to hone their efforts for improving the instructor experience by focusing on creating demo courses and providing better unboxing solutions to new instructors. This research highlighted issues that many internal stakeholders did not know existed. They did not realize that sales reps created instructor accounts, and by visualizing the steps and workarounds in the process, we were able to highlight key unmet needs in the instructor’s product discovery and adoption experience. This led us to explore opportunities for instructors to demo products without requiring sales reps to do the legwork of creating an account.