30% increase in success rate: How LocknCharge improved product navigation with Lyssna

You might not be familiar with LocknCharge, but if you have children, there's a good chance they're interacting with LocknCharge products every day at school.

LocknCharge provides solutions that help schools and IT departments manage large fleets of devices. Their products range from charging carts to advanced smart lockers, all designed to streamline the use and management of devices like laptops, tablets, and Chromebooks.

“We’re in nearly every school in Australia and after that success, we expanded into the US,” shares Ellie Friesen, Product Manager at LocknCharge.

We spoke with Ellie about how Lyssna has become an essential part of their user testing process. She shares how her team uses the platform to test and refine product navigation before launch, achieving outstanding results through an iterative testing approach.

Challenge

"When Australia started rolling out devices for children in schools, they had this problem of where to put all these devices, how to charge them, and how to make sure no one steals them. So that's where our charging carts came in,” Ellie explains.

As the company expanded, they faced new challenges. In the US, many schools run on a one-to-one device program, where each student is assigned their own device. This created new needs around managing these devices, including repairs and replacements. 

LocknCharge responded with smart lockers, which are equipped with charging ports and powered by advanced software. These lockers allow students to loan laptops, drop off broken devices, or charge their own. Ellie adds, "The software is essentially running workflows for IT teams to track loaner devices, overdue equipment, and repair requests."

This is where Ellie and her team come into play, overseeing the app and portal, making sure these products deliver a great user experience for their users. When she joined in 2022, they were relying solely on in-person testing, which posed challenges for the US market.

“Because of the time difference between Australia and the US, live user testing wasn’t always feasible. We needed a fast, efficient way to validate designs.”

As a small team, their focus was finding a tool that could support quick, frequent testing rather than large-scale studies. From her previous experience and some online research, Ellie brought on Lyssna to help address these challenges. 

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Solution

Since integrating Lyssna into their workflow, Ellie and her team “use pretty much all of it, from quick surveys to design testing and validating, using the prototyping features and five second tests. We recruit through the panel as well.”

“I really love how the prototype testing integrates with Figma. It’s so quick and easy to link everything up.”

Ellie Friesen

Product Manager at LocknCharge

“We’ll recruit through the panel, do a set of testing, refine it, and then do that same test to our list which is more specific, to double-check everything.”

Recruiting participants through Lyssna’s research panel also simplified their user interviews, freeing up time for the team to focus on product development rather than the logistics usually faced with manually setting up user interviews. 

The addition of the Recordings feature has also been valuable to Ellie and her team. “It's good to see what actually happened in the test, especially seeing how people think with their cursors. You can see them read with their cursors, so you know exactly where they're looking.”

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The speed and ease of use of the tool proved to be valuable in their testing processes, especially as the team tackled the major task of redesigning their product navigation. 

“We’re testing early, and you weed out usability problems before you get any further. It’s just awesome – you should always be testing.”

Results

“We made this really cool navigation that was essentially just icons. It looked great, but we weren’t sure it would perform well with our users," adds Ellie.

Their target audience consists largely of IT professionals, meaning the navigation could afford to be more technical than a typical consumer product. But even with a tech-savvy audience, usability remained a critical concern.

The potential risk of launching a navigation system that might confuse users or decrease efficiency was high. 

“We tested two versions side-by-side, and the one we wanted performed just as well as the other option. So, that was really good to see,” shares Ellie.

Beyond navigation, Ellie also found value in using Lyssna for nomenclature and message testing. "We had made some assumptions about the wording in our app, thinking it was clear, but when we put it in front of people at a trade show, they were confused between options."

Realizing they hadn’t tested that aspect of the app, the team went back and ran tests through Lyssna. “We found that it failed, so we ran variants and fixed it right away. That was awesome.”

During this testing phase, the success rate of their navigation test improved dramatically.

"It was a pretty significant difference,” Ellie shares. “Had we launched with the original design, it would have been very bad. I’m sure we would have eventually figured it out, but it’s better to launch with better results.”

Lyssna has proven to be a beneficial "safety net" for the team, avoiding potential usability issues that could have impacted their product launch. The rapid feedback from users has allowed Ellie’s team to make informed decisions and confidently move forward with their preferred design choices.