Jon-Michael Hanna

Overview

I coordinate research across multiple products and platforms. It is common to find patterns across research requests and insights that necessitate a more strategic approach to both be more efficient and to allow our findings to have more robust impact for the organization.

The Challenge

I noticed anecdotal evidence across multiple studies that showed various expressions of customers concerns around their privacy. At the same time, I was receiving research requests from other product teams that touched on these anecdotal themes. I needed a way to accommodate the new requests efficiently, maintain the connection to larger research questions across various studies, and also work with other insight teams at the company in order to substantiate what we had found in smaller scale studies.

Tools

UserTesting.com, SurveyMonkey, LucidSpark, Confluence

Usability Testing

Various rounds of usability testing revealed a recurring theme of privacy concerns for customers. Some of the studies had privacy concerns as a central area of inquiry, others did not. But it became apparent that elements related to privacy and security broadly were serving as blockers to usability and feature adoption.

We fed each individual team with insights that would help their designs but one-off fixes would only take us so far. The opportunity related to one feature gave me the opportunity to expand our research approach.

Strategy Alignment

I brought together stakeholders from three different product verticals to align on a strategy that took our usability results and expanded on them.

I provided goals, research questions and timelines with each of the proposed research activities and ensured that delivery of insights coincided with production/development timelines.

This was also a chance to educate stakeholders on that multi-faceted ways that UXR can support their aims beyond basic usability testing.

In-Depth Interviews

After proposing and building alignment with the strategy, I mentored other researchers in order to execute.

The first goal was to understand:

• What tools were currently being utilized by customers to manager their privacy concerns?

• How do they make decisions about allowing their data to be shared or viewable by a company?

We learned from this research that customers were first and foremost making their decisions based on the brand as opposed to the value-proposition of the feature itself.

We also learned that users weren’t thinking of the problem in the same way the business was.

Survey Rounds

We knew that brand trust was an important angle of our research. But, research related to brand impacts are managed by our Marketing Research team.

In order to conduct this phase, I needed to coordinate research activities with marketing. We were able to review past research that both teams had conducted and arrived at some key gaps in existing data that would inform work moving forward.

We were able to find how our company fit within a broader range of brands. We also found that while there was high value placed in how companies managed customer information, it was also something that very few customers understood well and therefore required additional education.

With this rich set of data, we were able to create data-backed personas to help ground future work.

Workshop

I believe that co-ownership of insights is essential in order to truly build toward a customer-centered solutions.

Given the amount of data that had been collected, it was important to aggregate this information and collectively determine what this meant for central customer problems.

This workshop helped us align on:

• Personas

• Primary customer problems

• How to understand the differences between what a customers says vs what they do

Impact

We saw that while customers express concern about their privacy they also do not understand the threats well. Given the potential gaps in their understanding:

• Narrow the solutions that we would use when testing future design concepts

• Adopt a set-it and forget it approach

• Find opportunities for education that do not increase anxiety

• Explore what new feature sets means for brand positioning

Next steps

Our next step is to test concepts that emerge from the discussion and also use the personas as frames for future tests.