How an Expert Review can identify pain points in your digital product; our work for NOC*NSF

Digital products that are well designed and implemented can empower professional users benefiting their growth and that of your organisation. It isn’t rocket science: when a digital platform works against you instead of with you, you WILL be frustrated. 

For commercial platforms there is often an alternative available, but this isn’t the case in the professional space. Most of the time there is no way around the technology and while it is supposed to support the work process, it is actually making it harder to work efficiently and seamlessly. The impact can be devastating for businesses: Demotivated professionals, inefficient and error-sensitive work flows, decreasing productivity. Everything that can lead to poor adoption, stagnation and even decreased business growth.

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What is an Expert Review?

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The best way to understand if your digital platform is doing the job it is supposed to do, is to look at your most important results, if they are lagging, you know there is something wrong and you should take a closer look. 

The best way to do that is by conducting an expert review. This is a check on the current state of your digital platform and assesses if your digital product is fit for the job you intended it to support. It helps identify issues in your digital product that are holding back your growth. 

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The fresk.digital specialists assess the process, interface, or technology against predefined goals and various hypotheses, resulting in a plan with a set of findings, insights and actionable recommendations for improvement. The form of the expert review is dependent on the business challenges you are facing, that is why we set up our expert review in three steps:

• Scope: Creating a joint understanding of the scope to assess the most important goals and challenges.
• Review: Reviewing the challenges from a human centred data, design and/or tech perspective.‍
• Advice: A concrete advice on how to move forward and get back on track to reach your growth goals.

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Expert review in practice

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Our client NOC*NSF owns and manages the platform Sportinfrastructuur.nl. In order for the Dutch population to enjoy sports and exercise, a functional, affordable, qualitative and sustainable sports infrastructure is key. Their digital quality management platform serves as a single source of truth of the sports infrastructure. It helps local governments with union rules and regulations for realisation, exploitation and renovation of safe and sustainable sports accommodations, and manages the quality of current sports infrastructure.

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At the beginning of 2024 NOC*NSF sought the help of fresk.digital, because they were not satisfied with Sportinfrastructuur.nl in its current form, they felt their investment did not match the results it was bringing them and the growth they were aiming for. To really understand how we could help them, we did a thorough expert review. 
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Scope:

We identified three important challenges NOC*NSF was facing:

• Their system was unstable;
• Their platform was not extensible;
• The digital product’s usability was below par, resulting in frustration for their professional users.

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Review:

To get a clear view on where the core of the challenges lay, we took a closer look at the technical code, the existing backlog and the product documentation. It helped us gather the right insights to map and prioritise the next steps to help them towards finally realising their business goals. This exercise exposed significant flaws in the existing development backlog, making this the first main priority in order to solve the key challenges of the digital platform. 

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Advice:

Based on the insights of the review, we suggested actionable advice in various domains.  

• Improve existing code:
  We weighed the pros and cons of moving forward with the existing code. The shortest path to value was to use the existing code and improve it. This meant taking over the code, starting improvements and deploying new features.

• Reset the backlog:
  The existing backlog was not up to standard: it lacked structure, contained an overload of irrelevant user stories that were uncategorised, unclear and unprioritised. The best next step was to start over and reassess the backlog items:
  • ‍User research:
    We conducted stakeholder and user interviews to assess focus.
  • ‍Priority setting:
    The research laid out three important themes for improvement:
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    • ‍Reliability and stability:
      Different stakeholders and clients have different needs from the platform. By differentiating between them and offering each role and responsibility their specific perspective, the platform will offer a clear flow for their needs.
    • ‍‍Content expansion; As an add-on to the existing content and information on the platform, there is a need for more types of content for different professional users. 
    • ‍Visible user-friendliness: The platform had bugs in the user experience bringing frustration to the professional user in their workflow. By taking these away we bring a seamless user experience and a happy flow.

With this focus, the backlog now contained the best next steps towards reaching the business and user goals of NOC*NSF for the short term, but still with the eye on the long term vision.

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Result:

Thanks to the Expert Review we were able to create a reliable platform for NOC*NSF and their professional users, making it a digital product that supports their work flow instead of working against them. The progress will be made while we keep the platform stable and reliable.

Now that the platform is reliable it makes space for further improvements and new features. We are currently measuring the platform (both qualitative and quantitative). In this Optimise & Grow phase we gather insights, allowing us to learn from the behaviour of the professional user. This helps us define and prioritise improvements and changes that are beneficial for their business growth and their users needs. Bob Thomassen, responsible for Sportinfrastructuur.nl at NOC*NSF says: “It was no coincidence that we approached fresk.digital to help us with the challenges of our digital platform. Their expertise and structured approach helped us assess the pain points in Sportinfrastructuur.nl and help solve the main issues our professional users were running into. And we are glad we did! For our stakeholders and clients the optimisation is making a huge difference. We are actually seeing this in the use of our service.” 

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Conclusion

The expert review has allowed us to get deep, contextual insights and understanding on how to move forward and solve our clients’ challenges. By stabilising the platform and improving the user experience, we are now able to bring NOC*NSF to the next step of their evolution and give them space to grow. The process was quick, focused and followed the shortest path to value.

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Learn more

Are you noticing that your systems are no longer working for you and your professional user? Then maybe an expert review can bring you closer to a solution.

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