Rocky Mountain Bottled Water - Littleton, CO. RMBW provides water solutions for both commercial and residential customers. With an active customer volume of over 5,000 accounts, they are considered a leader in Colorado's water industry. To better serve their rapidly growing customer base, the company invested in their first ever fully functional online user portal, where customers can manage their deliveries, request new products, and manage their billing/invoices.
The developers focused strictly on features and development cost, rather than user experience and UI design. This led to a rushed launch of a barely finished product that was not tested on any real users before it went live. Complaints and support calls began to sky-rocket once the new software went live. The two largest complaints were onboarding (the sign up process) and the user interface (many people couldn't figure out how to navigate the UI once they were in).
I have worked with RMBW in the past, I used to be the Digital Marketing Manager and a few years after that I redesigned their website. With that in mind, I already had a very good idea as to the problem and their user's needs for a better experience. Despite that, I knew to really solve a problem I have to first know exactly what it is. I decided to test the current portal on 4 different user groups. Each group had 2 participants. If the project timeline and budget had permitted, I would have at least doubled the amount of user's we tested the first version of the portal on. The groups were formed based on the 4 user personas me and the owner designed for Rocky Mountain Bottled Water based on their customer demographics data.