User and Market Research – Discovery

Effective, well-designed and useful products do things users need in the way they need things done. For this reason, the first step of my process is user research. I've done this at a very high level to unearth user stories that have driven new features, functions and whole products, and also at a detail level to better understand motivations, tools and impediments at a task level to create the elegant, efficient designs that help people accomplish things faster more easily and more powerfully than would be possible otherwise.

I use many different tools to accomplish this, ranging from quick and dirty to rigorous and formal. As a seasoned leader, I've become expert at understanding both the goals and the constraints under which I must operate and can select the best techniques and deliverables to gather the most business-critical information with the least possible resources.

Target Market User Study – OneSource

I was leading the design of OneSource's next generation sales intelligence product. Their previous products were for a broad market of users, and so to understand the very specific needs of the sales reps they were targeting, I conducted extensive one-on-one interviews with salespeople to understand the following:

  • Goals & Motivations
  • Tools
  • Skills
  • Techniques
  • Ecosystem
  • Information needs
 

Deliverables

Presentation to senior executives

Accompanied by this powerpoint deck, I delivered a presentation to senior executives and the project team that provided the key takeaways from the user research I had conducted. This served as the kickoff of the design process.

Analysis Document

I also created a detailed reference document compiling what I had learned

User Personas

Lastly, I distilled the essence of the interviews I conducted into two user personas, one for each type of sales user we were targeting.

Target Market User Study – Blue Egg

While managing the product and design team at Green Building Blocks (the name of the company at the time), I led the target market and user study for the relaunch and redesign of GreenBuildingBlocks.com as a B2B marketplace. This study consisted of one-on-one interviews with a cohort of green building professionals to understand:

  • Their level of green building experience
  • Their business goals
  • The features and functions that would be most valuable to them

Each interview featured both qualitative and quantitative questions in order to:

  • Develop a story-based understanding of each user
  • Identify and prioritize possible features and enhancements

Deliverables

Strategy Document

 The research conducted formed the basis of the master strategy document for the redesign. In addition to summarizing the qualitative and quantitative user findings from the interviews, the document laid out the primary features for the relaunch as well as beginning the process of mapping out target user flows.

Contextual Work Analysis – Sovereign Bank

Sovereign Bank was integrating three different internal systems and ten customer transactions into one unified UI via a middleware platform. The there were two user types for the system: call center representatives, and branch representatives. Since this was a mission-critical system for both users — especially call center reps — it was critical that the interface be intuitive, fast and effective for all transactions. In order to achieve this, I spent three days on-site interviewing reps and watching how they do their job. This included gathering and creating the following:

  • A basic profile
  • Motivations
  • Work layout
  • Resources
  • Task analyses

Deliverables

Middleware Style Guide

This critical user information was all captured in the Middleware Style Guide — which was really more of an all-around UX bible for the project going forward — and enabled the creation of interface recommendations, usability goals and conceptual models for the project going forward, also captured in the style guide.

Ad Hoc User Research

In extremely fast moving startup environments with significant time and resource constraints, user research often needs to be done informally and with minimal deliverables, often with proxies for actual users. These were all the case with Brightleaf where 1) our target market was $800/hour attorneys with whom we would not be able to get time for formal interviews or studies. Instead, I utilized members of our target audience within the company itself, attorneys who were co-founders and colleagues. In this case, I did not formal deliverables of the types shown above since these would be both significantly time and resource-intensive, and would not be necessary for a close-knit, agile team that was meeting daily to review progress anyway. The primary output of this process was, instead, a comprehensive set of user stories that would subsequently be whittled down to determine the scope of our initial MVP. These user stories are documented in another section of the Process and Deliverables section.