In my email inbox was a holiday greeting and newsletter from one of our clients, OfficeArrow. While reading the newsletter, I reflected on the incredible journey this company has taken in the past year.
This time last year, OfficeArrow was in the concept stage. There was no website. The company had four full-time employees and several whiteboards full of ideas.
Enablus had been brought in to lead the User Experience Design for their site. We completed one focus group to identify segments in their targeted audience and to unearth critical versus nice-to-have requirements. In mid-December of '07, there was a flurry of IA design and wireframing to construct a narrative for why OfficeArrow would become important in the hearts and minds of their user base. The next goal was to validate our wireframes with a second focus group in early January.
Fast forward to today. OfficeArrow is a thriving community for office professionals - defined as administrative assistants, office managers, and event planners. The site has over 92,000 registered users (plus the thousands of lurkers who never register). As mentioned in a prior post, this rate of growth is above average. How did OfficeArrow accomplish this?
- They know their audience and have segmented it appropriately. During the first focus group, we identified three distinct groups of users. Two of these became primary personas, the third was placed on a backburner for later development.
- They narrowed their feature set to focus ONLY on the needs of the primary personas. On the original whiteboards were many (seemingly good) ideas. However, after refining the critical requirements for the primary personas, we reduced the scope of Release One.
- They have dedicated resources to seed the site with content and evangelize the community. Robert Ball, the CEO, made a early decision to hire content specialists to seed the site during the early months. All of the content contributors are former office professionals (e.g., they have walked in the shoes of their users). Eventually, the site reached a tipping point where a majority of the content is user generated, not staff generated.
