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At HelloWallet I planned a research project to better understand our users and how they manage their finances. I decided to use a combination of a diary study and in-person interviews for the research method, which would allow me to collect data on their natural usage and have an in-depth conversation.
I began by interviewing different teams within the company to hear what questions they had about our users and how research findings could potentially help them make decisions. From that exercise, I wrote the discussion guide and created individual surveys with TypeForm for the diary study.
The plan was to conduct several rounds of interviews spread out over a few months. A summary of the first round of interviews is complete and the second round is in the recruiting phase.
Questions from teams organized by theme. Helped to visualize burning questions when different groups wanted to learn the same thing.
Diary entries from TypeForm
Draft of a Framework from first round of interviews
Draft of a Framework from first round of interviews
I was asked to answer a question for the senior team at LivingSocial: How do people discover what is happening in their city or neighborhood? Using the dscout research app, I recruited a group of 40 people and asked them to share examples of how they find out what's happening tonight, this weekend, and into next week. People shared over 200 examples, what was great about them, and also what was lacking. Link to full deck of findings.
This research project aimed to answer the questions: How do merchants want to communicate with their customers? What do consumers want to hear about from merchants?
Approach: Diary study with consumers to track and catalogue their interactions with businesses. Followed by one-on-one field interviews with merchants and consumers.
Outcomes: Insights into current behaviors, identified gaps between merchant goals and what they are able to do, and recommendations for communication content and frequency.
This was a team research project where the interview moderation and analysis were shared. I was responsible for working with the Product Manager, determining the study goals and research approach, and guiding the final set of insights.
First stage of analysis - Tell the story of the interview. Notes and pictures from each interview are posted on the wall.
Next step - Group the themes. Common findings across interviews are grouped together and then named to create an insight.
Examples of what merchants are currently doing to reach customers well. Helps to tell the story and contrast with merchants who struggle.
One new feature that resulted from the Merchant/Consumer Engagement research was a communications tool within Merchant Center. I conducted a series of merchant interviews with screen mocks and included developers in the sessions. After the interviews I made posters with quotes from the interviews so the developers could keep the merchant perspective in mind while they built the tool.
Sketching a flow for custom messages
Early sketch of the Inbox
The merchant team wanted to re-think the Merchant Center mobile app. They had a list of possible features and didn't know if some or all of them should be included in the app. The research team conducted a dozen in-person observations and interviews to see how merchants used their mobile devices.
The interviews and analysis were a team effort. During the analysis we saw a pattern of how merchants were using their smartphones: mostly to check information that changed or updated frequently. We created a framework to divide tasks along a spectrum of Static/Dynamic informtaion and Focused/At-a-Glance effort.
I had the idea to map all their current smartphone activity and use that as a guide for which features in our app they would most likely to use. After mapping their current usage I was able to see that the majority of their tasks were for dynamic information. We then mapped all the proposed features for our app and recommended to prioritize the ones that fell within the usage map.
These are all the types of work-related tasks merchants did on their smartphones.
With this map overlaid on the framework we could begin to identify which of the LivingSocial features merchants would be most likely to use.
Features that fell into the yellow area were recommended as priorities to the mobile team. With limited resources for development we suggested they ficus on these features first.