Background
Companies need insight into user behavior but are often too busy and lack tools to conduct user research. As a result, they are forced to make costly product decisions without the confidence that user research can bring.
The goal
Gain insight into user behavior and needs to build products that delight clients.
Representative examples
As a UX researcher on multiple initiatives within the Marketing and Cloud team, I conducted quantitative and qualitative research on a variety of products.
Cloud product development
I recruited and ran rounds of testing using RITE methodology on a new product for enterprise development teams on the IBM Cloud platform. This involved writing the research objectives, screeners, and tasks, and recruiting and interviewing participants with Respondent.io and UserTesting.com. Through this testing, we were able to collect valuable insights into relevant audience that shaped our product designs.
Mobile optimization
We were missing out on sales by poorly performing pages, notably on mobile versions of some high traffic web pages. I collaborated with our digital strategist to conduct remote unmoderated user testing to understand what users valued. We also made extensive use of heatmap data, and were able to significantly improve the conversion rates with redesigned pages.
z15 Mainframe launch
Our content team needed to test messaging for a critical product launch. I adapted a new method of unmoderated testing with a target audience that collected sentiment on several marketing messages. We took a series of messages and abstracted them from the graphics and then targeted a subsection of the potential audience to gain insight into the sentiment. I worked closely with our copywriters and content team to generate a number of iterations and isolate messaging components to determine content that resonated.
From this testing, we were able to rapidly eliminate options that did not perform as well and use the results when we launched the national marketing campaign for this key product in IBM's portfolio.
Buyer demo research
Our hardware marketing team had a series of expensive third-party demos that were not performing to expectations. This was a particular problem because of the pandemic and the lack of in-person sales interactions. I conducted qualitative interviews with business partners and identified opportunities to strengthen the value proposition of the existing solution. I also designed and ran unmoderated user tests with IT users to understand how they would use our demos. From this research we were able to recommend a series of improvements to make the demos more useful.
Feature prioritization
For our Cloud platform team, we needed to know what new dashboard functionality developers would be most likely to use if created. A variety of options had been proposed but everything was based on opinion. To help gain actual user insight, I worked with another researcher and we created a card sorting test for the top 28 ideas.
We screened our target audience to approximately 30 users, a number recommended by industry benchmarks as a statistically significant sample for this type of test. We then used a variety of affinity maps and card sort readouts to prepare a playback to the team. From this playback, we were able to work with the product manager to prioritize creation of the first of the widgets that our users had indicated were of greatest usefulness to them.
Funnel analysis
Our marketing team was losing customers in the completion of some key forms. I created a visual format and tracked down quantitative data from a variety of obscure sources to display data in a way that our executives could use for decision making.
By using this data, we were able to pinpoint exactly where in the funnel we were experiencing the greatest user dropoff and make plans to optimize the journey and lead generation paths.
- User research
- Information architecture
- UX design
- Stakeholder management