Voice of the Partner Sessions
A creative way to host UX Research Workshops
What’s the best way to make sure you’re delivering the right product? Talk to your customers.
Over the past two years we’ve collected feedback over the ski season. From that foundation, we would create a roadmap for our partners to review, and then we would host a meeting for them to ask questions and clarify requirements. After that we’d make a few updates to what we planned to deliver and start development work.
This year, to provide a consistently superior product which is able to encompass both emergent technologies and partner needs, we decided to follow a more ambitious path. This came about from the realization that in order to succeed, planning and executing on our vision within a few short months over summer break wasn’t going to achieve our ambitious goals. Instead, we would need to develop, test, and release fewer updates to prepare for the 22/23 season, focused on function and stability of our platform, while rolling out an entirely new application for the 23/24 season.
As a response to these needs, the product team at OnlySky put together an eight week program called Voice of the Partner (VOP) sessions, and enlisted the help from many of our team members. These groups were designed for our customers to participate in providing feedback and additional requirements regarding our vision for OnlySky 2.0. During these 1 hour long sessions we discussed 6 key areas of our application including:
User, Admin, and OS Settings
Business Ops and Snowsports Settings
Snowsports School
Point of Sale (POS)
Storefront/Ecommerce
Dashboards, Analytics, Reporting with Time & Pay
Snow-specific OnlySky partners were invited to participate in discovering our vision for the future. We’ve had over 25% of our partnership participate in these sessions, and collected a lot of great feedback.
A typical session would include an introduction by Kim or Kelsey, followed by Andrey, our talented UX designer, walking partners through our product prototype, then followed by conversation centered on participants' reactions to and questions about what they had viewed on the screen. Meanwhile, in the background we were diligently taking notes to help capture their sentiment. Then the session would end with a sneak-peek of next week's session.
We know that you can’t build best-in-breed software in a vacuum. The vision which we’ve created through years of market research and analysis needed to be validated through the real world input of our partners. In some areas we were on the right track, delivering the right features and functionality. In other cases, we missed the mark. Collecting this kind of feedback was extremely important in moving to the next phase of our project, user testing.
During these sessions, we will present fully developed prototypes and ask select partners to participate in a 2:1 session. One OnlySky staff member will lead the user, while the other will observe their on-screen actions and note any expression of thoughts or feelings. This will provide positive proof that our product is hitting the mark, and ready to go into development, or it may need changes.
Our dedicated team is working tirelessly to deliver this product, and with the help of our partners we can’t wait to deliver OnlySky 2.0 in Fall 2023.