User Research Program

Project: Voice of the User Research Initiative
Role: UX Research
Scope: Creating a new program to quantitatively measure the health of the user experience over time.

The problem

Kobo had been in the Canadian market for a few years - but it was difficult to gauge the quality of the user experience after a device had been purchased. How could we improve tools and features to help users months and years into their initial hardware purchase?

What made this project interesting

I was hired to create a Dashboard that could measure the health of the eReader experience over time. We created a comprehensive customer journey and identified the key phases in the journey that might have the highest impact on customer happiness and decision making. These included: the pre-purchase experience, set up, initial use, ongoing use, and finally upgrading or stopping use.

Project Highlights

• Data Across the User Journey: We mapped out the experience for the entire customer journey from when a user learns about Kobo until they stopped using a Kobo. This helped us identify the most important phases to collect data. Working with the customer support team, we were able to send out phase-specific surveys right after a user set up their Kobo, 30 days after set up, 6 months after set up, and 6 months after their most recent log in. Surveys focused on: Ease of Use, General Satisfaction, and whether Help was Required.
  

• Within Phase Comparison: Because of the volume of survey sent out, our sample size was sufficient to determine differences between devices with statistical significance. I was able to see which devices performed better than others at the same phase of life, and create hypotheses to further investigate in subsequent qualitative research initiatives. I was also able to report on specific aspects of the experience that most affected customer happiness for each phase. For example, when asked to self-report length of setup time, some users stated many minutes longer than the machine-reported length of setup time. Perhaps this was an opportunity to design delight into the experience to help make the experience feel quicker.
  

• Between Phase Comparison: Most importantly, through a series of questions common across all phases, we were able to see how the experience with a Kobo degraded over time. Users reported feelings of happiness were higher at the 3-day and 30-day mark than at the 6-month mark. Through deeper research of the qualitative answers, we learned that many users experienced hardware or software issues and had difficulty solving them. This provided support for the need for a stronger, more robust, Help experience.