UX Foundational Research
eLearning Platform Case Study
About me…
Hello, I am Kat! I am a business psychologist with a background in business management, trying to break into the magical world of UX. Just recently, I acquired an opportunity to help a startup eLearning platform. Here is the UX foundational research I conducted.
Project description
The company operates an eLearning platform for architects and other design enthusiasts. Their content focuses on controversial futuristic design that is often missing in a university curriculum.
My Role
Initially, I was involved as a UX Researcher. However, as there was no Product Manager, UX Designer, or Business Coordinator, I had to take a leading role and do everything I could to point this project the right direction. I applied socio-technical systems thinking, wanting to adopt a lean start-up methodology. I followed the 5 stages of design thinking process, combined with the lean startup methodology.
In this article, I will focus on the foundational research that was conducted to understand the users’ motivations, needs, and frustrations. This was done by covering the first three stages of the design process: empathise, define, and ideate.
Later you can find details on:
- research questions
- analysis of methods
- outputs and deliverables explained
- impact
- future direction & recommendations
- reflection
Outputs & Deliverables
- personas
- job stories
- story map
- hierarchy of users’ needs
- short-, medium-, and long-term product strategy
- competitor analysis
- users’ unmet needs
- internal wiki
- ideation workshop
- story map workshop
Empathise
Planning
I asked the CEO to share previously completed research. Not entirely satisfied with the knowledge I gathered, I supplemented this by some of my own research. I started by conducting a short PEST analysis to help me to understand trends that are likely to shape the industry in the next few years. This allowed me to better assess the opportunities and threats that the startup might face in the future.
Research Objectives
Before setting research goals, I planned a meeting with the CEO to discuss business priorities and what she would like to get from this research. I reviewed existing materials to draw assumptions about potential users and our competitors.
From that mentioned above, I found that aspiring young architects and designers tended to further develop their skills to some extent but it was not clear what the distinguishing attributes were between those who were willing to do so and those who were not. Foundational research aimed to provide a deeper understanding of our users.
Questions
- Who are our customers, what are their motivations, frustrations, attitudes, feelings, goals, and needs?
- What resources do they use to learn and why?
- How do they feel about existing solutions?
- What do they think about competitors?
- Do they spend money on online resources?
Research Methods & Analysis
In-Depth Interviews
I prepared interview questions that would fill the gaps in the existing research and answer research questions.
I used MS Teams for the remote session and gave the participants an introduction about the purpose of the interview and its structure. Then I gave them an opportunity to ask any questions. I recorded a session with the consent of the participants and took just brief notes so I could be fully focused on what they had to say. After the session, I typed out the notes and stored them on the company’s cloud, available to the team. I asked the team to review the notes prior to the workshop I later organised.
I scheduled the online workshop, using the tool Miro and invited the CEO and content creator (at the time the only members of the team). The purpose was to review the data together in order to get a multi-disciplinary interpretation of the data. Moreover, the team was engaged in the design process and started empathising with users early on.
I prepared the workshop in advance by putting up the sticky notes ready to use and I split the board so it would be easy to distinguish the categories. I prepared another grid below with columns labeled as Goals, Wants & Needs, and Pains. I introduced the purpose of the workshop, then went through structure and timing, explained the instructions, and addressed questions. We read the notes and then added information according to the common theme in the first grid. Then we discussed them further and divided these into attitudes, goals, needs, and pains.
Define
Outputs & Deliverables
Personas
I synthetised the data gathered from foundational research to create personas and job stories. The set of attributes were clearly distinguishing our users. I used the Likert scales (1 — beginner; 5 — advanced, etc) to emphasise these differences. I scheduled a meeting with the team to present these personas and asked for feedback. The content creator has years of experience with architecture students so he was able to add the wider users’ perspective to my findings. After the session, I incorporated his feedback into personas.
I created job stories that clearly state what our users try to accomplish by learning this school of architecture.
Job Stories
I created job stories for each persona, starting with the persona’s situation, followed by the persona’s want and finished with the desired outcome.
For the persona in the picture above, one of the frustrations was that as beginners, with insufficient support from their university and a busy schedule, they kill too much time searching for advice on how to achieve the desired outcome if they do not fully understand what to do. Hence, one of the job stories was:
“When I learn new things, I want to access a community that will provide me with guidance and support, so I won’t kill extra time by searching for a solution.”
Hierarchy of Users’ Needs
The users’ needs reminded me of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs and that inspired me to create a Pyramid of user’s needs. The idea was that lower users tried to satisfy their lower needs such as the need to belong and connect, whereas the relatively advanced users were on the top of the pyramid with the need to satisfy their higher needs such as self-actualisation.
I also used this information to create a competitor analysis. I compared competitors that our participants mentioned and compared their content with users’ needs. I created an online spreadsheet that clearly stated what features are necessary, and what features are unique. This allowed me to identify our potential competitive advantages. Also, this helped us to identify companies that we could partner with rather than compete with them.
Ideate & Validate
After having personas and job stories complete, I organised another workshop to ideate solutions. I created an exercise in which each participant played one persona. I explained the instructions:
- get familiar with the persona, read the jobs they try to get done, and share your opinion on these
- write your idea of how to resolve their pains on the sticky note and place it under the jobs they try to get done
- present these to the team using the problem statement template
- then discuss with the team and let others add solutions that come to mind
- once finished, vote for the solutions with dots that were assigned to you
Quantifying of Users’ Unmet Needs
I created a survey (using Likert scales) that measured how important the identified solutions were for our users and how satisfied they were with existing solutions. This helped me to quantify the unmet needs. I quantified how many users rated particular needs as important and very important and how many were satisfied and very satisfied with these solutions. I used the formula:
Opportunity = Importance + (Importance — Satisfaction)
This helped us with prioritisation, and we knew what brings high value.
Business Strategy
After the ideation, we listed short-, medium-, and long-term solutions that reminded me of the Job Demands-Resources model, which I borrowed from job design literature.
Hindering Demands are frustrations that our customers face. These lead to cognitive strain and negatively affect learning. However, it was proved that Challenging demands, that give a person space to grow, contribute to motivation positively.
Our users possess personal resources that are their personality attributes or existing network that help them to cope with their frustrations and keep their motivation intact. We came up with resources that will enhance their motivation and support them with their learning.
Our long-term goal is to actively listen to our users and give them an opportunity to craft the content, which will help us to provide better learning resources and keep them engaged and motivated.
I created an internal wiki on Google Sites so I could easily share my findings with all the stakeholders.
Impact
- company’s vision & mission
- business objectives for 5 years
- visually expressed business strategy presented to potential investors
- product roadmap
- coordination of marketing activities
- increased team collaboration and alignment
Next Steps & Recommendations
I continued with further stages of the design thinking process combined with lean startup methodology. This link will take you to an article about directional research where I cover the measure, learn and prototype stages.
To validate the solutions and understand the unmet needs, I would organise a focus group to discuss these.
Reflection & Challenges
Interviews
- Language — prior to the testing I assumed that all initial volunteers would have a good level of English. This could negatively skew the data. If a participant struggled to express themselves, I asked for confirmation of my understanding. This could be negatively affected by social desirability bias. Participants might have agreed to my interpretation so they would avoid potential embarrassment.
- describe a process — when I asked about steps the users were going through when they are looking for a new source, some of the participants forgot what they were talking about and they got too carried away to be able to continue talking about what they had started. Next time, I will create a template that will cover steps (short description) and satisfaction with this process (draw an emoji).
General Thoughts
I found that building rapport during the interviews and asking everyone involved throughout the process to participate in further research helped me to build up the network of early adopters. When an issue arose, I had a bunch of users I could reach out to and they never let me down.
