The Burning Bridge: Bringing focus to a SAAS product
Case Study
Hauler Hero
Hauler Hero is poised to revolutionize the waste management industry with cutting edge SAAS software.
About
- Website: HaulerHero.com
- Industry: Waste Management
- Timeline: 6 months
Services
- Discovery Research
- UX Audit
- UX Design
- Research Operations
- Repository Development
Deliverables
- Product Feedback Strategy
- Product Feedback Playbook
- Research Repository
- Dovetail Implementation
- Research Templates
- Research Reports
- Workflow Diagrams
- UX Flows & Wireframes
- Personas
Team
- Bryan (All Roles)
Project Info
Challenge
Hauler Hero is poised to revolutionize the waste management industry with cutting edge SAAS software. As a startup, they identified a need, acquired funding, and built what they thought was a comprehensive product. The problem was, they built the platform in a vacuum and pre-sold it to dozens of companies. As they tried to implement, problem after problem arose.
Hauler Hero had no internal research expertise, so they reached out to Rill Insights to find and fix the problems with their software. They also needed a product feedback strategy and the systems in place to support gathering and synthesizing customer feedback, which the product team could use to drive decisions.
Solution
Rill Insights stepped in to identify usability issues, conduct discovery research to understand the core needs of customers, and put a product feedback strategy into place. A UX assessment found enough issues to fill the product roadmap for a year. We then spent a week “in the field,” visiting 7 different rural haulers to understand their lived reality. What we discovered was that the solution was too complex. Our field visits also prevented churn of 5-7 signed customers.
These findings helped the company scale back the platform and redesign features to meet validated needs, shedding the scope creep to deliver a product that fit the market and workflows of customers.
ROI: From 50% churn in 1 month to 700% growth in ARR over 5 months.
$40K ARR to $1 Million ARR in 6 months.
Our Process
Title
Kickoff
Our collaboration with Hauler Hero began with a burning bridge scenario. The founders had identified huge inefficiency problems with waste management industry software, and envisioned a modern SAAS platform to manage operations. They received funding and built a solution, but when implemented the product faced so many issues that churn was over 50%. The future looked very uncertain.
UX Audit
We began the project with a UX audit, completing a heuristics review that identified over 130 usability issues. This alone informed the product roadmap for the next year, but we needed to do more than understand what was wrong with the user experience. We needed to understand what the right product looked like from the customers’ perspective.
Ethnographic Fieldwork
To gather that information, we conducted ethnographic field research on-site at 7 different haulers in 5 states. Our goal was to understand their lived reality…what the day-to-day looks like, their tools and workflows, the team, and other contextual dynamics that you just can’t understand with remote interviews. In just a week we learned to see the world from their eyes, and then used that knowledge to redefine the scope of the Hauler Hero software. As it turned out, it was a much smaller product than they had built.
By simplifying the product and focusing on only the key Jobs to Be Done, Hauler Hero was able to deliver what customers wanted. Moreover, the field research mended relationships and prevented churn of early adopters.
Research Management
Rill Insights continued to support Hauler Hero by implementing Dovetail to analyze all the field data and future customer feedback. We built a bespoke repository and trained the internal team how to manage the platform. We also created a comprehensive playbook for all things research, from continuous discovery to usability testing.
UX Design
The final phase of our engagement leveraged insights from research to design better experiences. We switched roles from research to UX design, collaborating with the product team to design more efficient flows for customer service, billing, and routing.
Project Completion
The project closed with a smooth handover of work and processes. The insights gained from our research continue to inform the product roadmap, and Hauler Hero is successfully scaling.
UX Research
Research deliverables include a detailed heuristic evaluation report from the UX Audit and an interview guide we printed and used in ethnographic field work.
UX Design
Leveraging the research findings, we were able to map out the key workflows. We then worked on improving several experiences. These Figma designs illustrate screens from a new customer account creation flow. We then tested these prototypes with customers before making final revisions and sending to engineering.
