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As a Software Engineering Intern at SISU VR, I helped the team reinvent the mundane process of compliance training with virtual reality. My main projects helped make the product more effective. I aim to increase the amount learned after using the product and to improve end-users compliance-based behaviours after using the product.
What is SISU VR?
SISU VR provides an immersive VR experience for prevention training. While other companies use lengthy, monotonous compliance training, SISU VR’s product uses virtual reality to make this a more immersive and educative experience. They deliver compliance and prevention training with the competitive edge of Virtual Reality with immersive, realistic situations.
My manager wanted my to help make the product more effective. But what did this mean?
What’s the Product Goal?
My manager wanted my help to make the product more effective but what did this mean? Using my psychology background, I decided to frame effectiveness as “how much does a user learn from using the product?” and “how do they react in unfamiliar problem situations?” I created and ran tests on users to see how much information they were retaining and how well they reacted in new situations. I used this data to establish a benchmark for future iterations of the product.
So how do we increase product effectiveness?
I did this mainly with competitor analysis and researching market experts.
Now that we had a shared vision for product success, I identified, tested, and analyzed the highest impact feature changes. I did this mainly through competitive analysis and research of market leaders. For the competitive analysis, I found competitors and researched their products, sales, and marketing strategies. For example, many competitors placed an emphasis on the content they were creating and so I suggested a focus on more learning content from SISU VR. Secondly, I researched what market experts wanted. This meant going through research on prevention training and translating it to implications for SISU VR’s product. For example, a lot of research talked about integrating content on Conflict Management and Gender constructs. So I created an intro video for the product that explained Conflict Management and gender constructs.
Did these product changes work?
the product’s effectiveness went up from 42% to 94%
In the last week of my internship, we were able to integrate several suggestions I created to increase the effectiveness of the product. To test this, I ran a simple A/B test where half the participants received an old version of the product and half received the new version with the product changes I had made. Shockingly, the product’s effectiveness went up from 42% to 94%. My changes in the product lead to users learning more from the software as well as being able to better react to unfamiliar problems in the workplace.
