Wimba Pronto - building a strategic v 1.0 product from existing technology capabilities
Educational startup Wimba was seeking to expand its product offering, and hoped to leverage existing technology rather than have to build new core functionality.
PRODUCT MANAGEMENT
PRODUCT DESIGN
PRODUCT STRATEGY
USER RESEARCH
MANAGEMENT
Voice-over-IP, text messaging, screensharing, the ability to work with multiple types of content, and integration with the course management systems central to most schools' IT departments emerged as common strengths of leading products.
Strategically, this tool was also meant to reflect a new focus - on students rather than instructors. Existing applications already provided text messaging and VolP capabilities alongside integration with the university course management system, which contained student registration information. Course management systems had been extremely successful, but for the most part served only asynchronous communication needs, and were focused on the administration and the instructors, not the students. (Keep in mind this was years before Facebook and Slack.)
We decided to build a CMS-integrated, voice and screenshare-enabled instant messaging app.
I conceived and designed a two-tab system to allow students to collect contacts from a larger community. Students could readily browse the people in their (non-editable) Classmates tab, populated by the CMS, and add them to their (editable and persistent beyond the semester) Contacts tab.
Since the timeline was very aggressive (roughly 6 months), research time was limited. I gathered a group of students using surveymonkey and craigslist, and conducted individual interviews to answer some critical questions.
Among these:
Would students use a university-specific IM client alongside other clients they were already using? (yes, many were already juggling clients)
Was the concept of an IM client automatically populated with classmates appealing? (yes)
One new discovery:
Due to large survey courses and students maintaining increasingly large contact lists, an integrated find feature emerged as a good addition.
I did an extensive feature-by-feature analysis of every major instant messaging app in the market and wrote detailed functional specs.
Voice-over-IP was a major differentiator and as such featured prominently in the final design.
Wimba was acquired by CMS and edutech giant Blackboard within two years of the introduction of this product, which still exists (https://pronto.io/edu/).