The account management pod was looking to introduce the concept of “orgs” to the app. This would allow an admin to handle billing and view activity across multiple teams. We had received feedback that billing was unnecessarily complex and could be unpredictable, a huge issue for user trust.

The purpose of this usability study was to see whether participants were able to understand the concept of orgs and their relationship to teams from the prototype. They were also asked to perform some tasks like creating their org, adding and removing a team, and talking through the information they saw on the org billing page. While all participants successfully completed the tasks, they all showed some confusion about the relationship between teams and orgs.

Due to these results, the PM and designer went back to the drawing board to think about which parts of the org should be visible and invisible to users. They decided that it was too confusing for the user to have the power to create an org. In the next design, orgs would be created by an account manager, and the home screen of the app would be the org overview page.

The next usability test dropped users into their home screen with their org name and nested teams. Users were asked to complete the same tasks as in the first iteration. In contrast to the first test, all users correctly identified and explained the relationship between teams and orgs.