TechRepublic Premium User Feedback
Overview
TechRepublic Premium, owned by TechnologyAdvice, is a subscription-based service that offers IT professionals and business leaders access to a wide range of resources, including ready-made policies, templates, eBooks, and research reports. These resources are designed to help users streamline their IT management, enhance cybersecurity, improve project management, and implement best practices across various aspects of technology and business operations. Subscribers also gain access to expert analyses, guides, and tools tailored to support decision-making and strategy development in a rapidly evolving tech landscape.
Currently, TechRepublic Premium has no procedure for collecting user feedback on their experiences regarding the service.
As part of my internship at TechnologyAdvice, a B2B technology sales company, for nine weeks I led a user feedback initiative brand new to the company aimed at getting direct feedback from current users regarding their experiences, thoughts, and desires for TechRepublic Premium. This initiative included developing and conducting surveys and interviews as well as creating forum posts to provide users different channels for offering feedback. The feedback collected from this project provided the TechRepublic Premium team insightful ideas on how to improve the service and reduce the decrease in subscribers.
Furthermore, this project served as a foundation for creating recurring user research projects across TechnologyAdvice’s website portfolio.
Roles:
Project Lead
User Researcher
Time:
9 Weeks
Methods:
User Research
Surveying
Interviewing
Data Analysis
Tools:
MS Clarity
monday.com
Google Suite
FigJam
Objectives
The two main objectives of this initiative were as follows:
Collect ongoing user feedback on the TechRepublic Premium subscriber experience.
Create a standard for user research/feedback projects for TechnologyAdvice’s website portfolio.
Approach
I first started this project by learning about TechRepublic Premium (TRP) and its user base; investigating reasons why users subscribe and what they gain out of the service. I was able to get a better understanding of the initial frustrations users have that lead them to cancel their subscription.
Furthermore, I used softwares such as MS Clarity to examine data of how users interact with the website, articles, and resources offered. This data offered crucial information into user behavior in order to to prepare user feedback resources.
After completing initial research, I developed survey variations that would be sent out to users for quick feedback. These surveys emphasized using a mix of qualitative and quantitative data while asking general questions to allow users flexibility in how they responded. Click here to see variations of the survey.
To distribute our survey, we prioritized sending it to current TRP subscribers through the weekly newsletter: a resource that proved to have significant engagement among users. This strategy demonstrated to be successful as we received responses with constructive feedback.
See below for images of the main survey sent out to users as well as how it was continually marketed in the TRP newsletter.
After sending out our survey in newsletters, I realized that it would be valuable to expand our research from just TechRepublic Premium to all of TechRepublic due to the feedback addressing components related to services not included in the Premium subscription.
Because of this, I widened our user feedback outlets to include more possible methods; most notably forums. Similarly to newsletters, forums had proved to be a valuable asset for engagement on TechRepublic as users would start discussions among each other.
By collaborating with the TechRepublic editorial team, I developed forum posts aimed at asking broad questions to incentivize users to respond with constructive feedback about the service.
See below for images of example forum posts.
By distributing surveys and forum posts, we received sufficient feedback to begin preparing for user interviews with the goal of receiving more in depth responses to their comments. I wrote interview plans and scripts to address general themes and ask follow up questions with the goal to get the users thinking differently.
While I am unable to share interview resources, the interviews conducted allowed our team to get to know our users on a more personal level and hear from them in a unique way to learn about what feedback they have about the service.
This project has created the foundation for TechnologyAdvice to continue conducting user feedback projects with other websites. I developed survey, forum, and interview resources that are used today to get this feedback.
Summary
This initiative helped me learn about how users interact with subscription-based services in the B2B technology spaces. Additionally, I built research and development skills especially with exposure to softwares such as MS Clarity.
As a project lead, I was responsible for managing survey distribution, forum documentation, and interview coordination. Furthermore, this cross-team collaboration taught me how to communicate with various stakeholders and managers to ensure alignment with project goals.
I hope you enjoyed learning about my TechRepublic Premium User Feedback project. If you would like to hear more about this project, please do not hesitate to reach out to me!