Holmes Corporation's sole UX designer transformed pre-market validation from time-consuming user interviews to rapid, evidence-based decision-making by integrating AskRally into product development. This hybrid approach enables faster iteration, stronger design validation, and more confident recommendations, all without expanding headcount.

"Try it out. You'll be impressed. Know that it is not a replacement for real user feedback, but it can help get to an informed decision so quickly in such an economical way—in both time and dollars—that you'd be unwise to be overlooking a tool like this for your team." – Cody Roemhildt

Key Results

• Collected 1,200+ user responses in a single afternoon for critical UX decision

• Reduced barrier to user testing, enabling validation during live brainstorming sessions

• Enabled evidence-based design recommendations to stakeholders with quantitative backing

The Challenge

Holmes Corporation partners with professional associations to develop and manage certification and training programs across the globe. As the sole Digital Experience Designer responsible for product UX across all education products, the challenge was clear: how do you gather meaningful user feedback when you're a one-person team in a resource-constrained company?

Before AskRally, user research meant scheduling and managing interviews, a process that was cumbersome and intensely time-consuming. Even worse, some key audiences were nearly impossible to reach, with responses either delayed or non-existent. The result was a significant gap between needing user validation and actually getting it.

"Although I got some great feedback, scheduling and managing the interview process was cumbersome and intensely time consuming. It was also very difficult to get timely—or any—responses from some of the key audiences we needed feedback from." – Cody Roemhildt

The Solution

Holmes Corporation discovered AskRally through their Fractional Chief Product Officer, who had seen the platform in use with another organization. The opportunity was immediately clear: synthetic testing could bridge the gap between limited research capacity and the constant need for user validation.

The team now uses AskRally in two primary ways. First, they build audiences that represent association demographics to understand potential market opportunities for new products. Second, they validate UX design decisions to ensure products are intuitive and easy to use, all before investing development resources.

"I started playing around with audiences and responses while in a brainstorming session, and was able to get some high-level feedback on some of the concepts we were discussing. It really opened my eyes to some of the possibilities, and opened the door to be doing more testing and giving us evidence-based assumptions to test with real users." – Cody Roemhildt

The workflow integrates AskRally with existing tools like Figma for visual design iteration, and ChatGPT and Claude to help develop audience descriptions from demographic data. Rather than replacing traditional user feedback, AskRally accelerates the path to evidence-based decisions that can then be validated with real users.

The Results

The impact has been transformative for both speed and confidence in design decisions. A particularly striking example came during the development of a product dashboard with a new authentication system.

Users would log in and see only the products they were licensed to access, but the authentication tool's default interface used a profile icon to access account functions like changing passwords and logging out. The team suspected this wouldn't be intuitive, but suspicion isn't evidence.

"I ran a quick user study by posting a screenshot to AskRally Gen Pop. I asked participants: 'If you wanted to log out, how would you do that?' The results confirmed our suspicions. None of them could figure it out confidently." – Cody Roemhildt

With validation that the default design wouldn't work, the team began iterating on different icon styles and placements. Over the course of a few hours, they tested various options and collected around 1,200 responses. The data revealed a clear winner: users understood they could use a gear icon for account settings and a dedicated sign-out button to log out.

"I brought these findings to the product meeting with a strong recommendation to implement the redesigned interface instead of using the out-of-box solution. I acknowledged that we'd still need to test the final implementation in production, but having 1,200+ users validate the approach gave us much stronger confidence in its success compared to launching with an unvalidated design."– Cody Roemhildt

Beyond individual projects, AskRally has fundamentally changed what's possible for a solo UX designer in a small company. User input remains critical, but it no longer needs to consume dozens of hours per week. The team can move more quickly and make faster, more informed decisions.

"It is easy to demonstrate the value of basing decisions on large-scale responses to a question rather than a hunch. I've done a demo of this tool to my whole company and was met with huge excitement around the new capabilities it offers our team." – Cody Roemhildt

About Holmes Corporation

Holmes Corporation partners with professional associations to develop and manage professional certification and training programs across the globe, serving technical and professional audiences in the education technology space.