Background

Salesforce contacted UserTesting to help understand how participants currently approach manual data entry and identify opportunity areas to inform Salesforce’s Optical Character Recognition (OCR) product. The goal of this study is to help Salesforce validate the OCR product currently in development and inform/influence their product road map.

Research Objectives

1. How do participants accomplish scanning currently?

2. What are the biggest pain points in the process?

3. What, if any, steps would participants want more assistance with? What opportunities for improving the scanning process exist?

Methodology

• Moderated discovery study - to encourage participants to provide detailed insights and to enable follow-up questions about their processes

• 10 participants on their computers

• People who scanned documents routinely, at least once a week

Key Takeaways

Note: While this project started out as a moderated interview and was intended to follow a typical detailed report deck, I decided a journey map would be the best way to convey the processes and areas of opportunities that the participants described. The final deliverable was a report deck, featuring a slide with the journey map linked to the MIRO board, positioned between my executive summary with key takeaways and recommendations for developing a market-leading scanner.

• Participants leveraged mobile scanning for convenience. Some participants appreciated the convenience of using mobile scanning apps like Adobe Scan to scan things no matter where they were (e.g., in the office, working from home, on the go)

• Connectivity issues caused delays in task-completion times. The biggest pain points existed around the reliability of scanning devices. Participants complained that mobile apps had delays in syncing to the desktop version. This increased the time it took to upload the file to their internal platform.

• Participants wanted to see a direct upload feature in their internal platform. Participant-scanned documents were sent to their email addresses to be downloaded to their computer and uploaded into their internal platform. They would like a streamlined process where scanned docs go directly to their internal platform.

Participants were asked what an absolutely painless scanning experience would look like. Here are a few of their ideas.

• It would be nice if there was a way for the scanner to read if something was too light and to autocorrect the brightness.

• After scanning, the document should uploaded immediately into the network, without the user needing to edit or download anything.

• Participants would like the ability to scan multiple pages and upload them into different documents.

Recommendations

Painpoint: Participants experienced delays when waiting for the mobile captures to show up on the desktop versions of the apps.

• Recommendation: Use very clear communication to update users about where they are in the process of uploading documents to the platform (e.g., “Loading…”)

Painpoint: Participants struggled to identify which document code to apply when uploading documentation into their internal platform.

• Recommendation: Consider creating smart tags where the platform can readily identify the type of document being uploaded and automatically tag or label it accordingly.

Painpoint: Participants struggled to make documents legible upon scanning (e.g., the writing in the margins.)

• Recommendation: Consider creating a platform function where users can edit the brightness, exposure, and contrast of specific areas of the document.