Website Discovery Research
Discovery to support the Management Concepts website redesign, including analyzing quantitative buyer behavior, persona creation, journey mapping (and more!)
This is a good project for you to look at if:
You want to hear about how I tend to approach the discovery process for a project requiring substantial research.
My Role
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User Experience Researcher
Methods
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User Interviews
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Persona Development
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Usability Testing
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Quantitative Research
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Metrics Tracking
Time
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Fall 2023 - Spring 2024
The Outcomes
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The creation of 4 personas for various buyer behavior
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The creation of 4 buyer journey maps
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Usability testing to identify key issues and painpoints of the current website
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Reports of buyer behavior on and off the website
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The artifacts from this research informed design decisions for complete redesign of our corporate website and is currently informing decisions for our eCommerce Overhaul (which I'm currently leading UX on)
The Goal
We wanted to not only update our website, but also reframe the way we were presenting ourselves to our users.
We wanted present ourselves as more than just a training company, we wanted to highlight our state of the art, people-forward online learning experiences, private group training, and coaching. To do this, extensive discovery was vital.
My Role
This wasn't just a quick update, it was a huge undertaking. We reframed the way that we interact with our users and present ourselves as an organization. UX was vital to this process. I was involved in this project end-to-end, but here's a bite-sized section on the discovery stage.
Research Steps
My Research Questions
Like any complicated project, this started with stakeholder management.
The initial project requirements were vague so it was necessary to meet with stakeholders to pinpoint their needs.
We settled on these main questions:
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Who are our users?
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How are users currently interacting with us
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What are their pain-points?
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What do they need from the website?
With the questions set, we worked on establishing a clear plan and cadence for reporting, delivery expectations, etc. so schedules could be as accurate as possible.
Finding our Existing Data
I got to spend some time with my favorite people to work with: Sales!
I left those conversations with some great anecdotal insight and access to a database full of customer data, including purchase history, payment methods, buying behavior, and much more! (a treat for a data-loving UXR)
The data was messy.
(Duplicate entries, incorrectly formatted columns, etc.)
So I rolled up my sleeves and did some data cleaning until it was formatted properly and playing nicely.
Roadblock!
Generate Insights from the Existing Data
I spent some time looking at what insights we could derive from our data. I made reports and data visualizations (I'd show them here, but that's sensitive customer data).
Using the reports and visualizations, I segmented different predicted persona and created some user profiles highlighting key differences. Some of the information on them included:
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Average purchase size
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Frequency of purchases
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Percentages of purchase methods and how payment methods differed by purchase type (i.e. X% used the website to purchase, and 75% of those purchasers paid via credit card).
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Most common job titles
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Anything notable about the groups (were there more DOD buyers in this group, etc.)
Here's a stripped down version of the profiles created via Miro (Actual profiles had more info, but this gives you the idea)
Finding the Problems with the Current Website
One of the goals for the research I generated with the stakeholders was to find the largest pain-points with the current website. That way we would know what made the most sense to focus our efforts on redesigning.
My First Step is ALWAYS hunt for our existing data
In this case we had Google Analytics data and data from Crazy Egg (which had heatmaps, scroll behavior, and brief snapshots of user behavior). This was a great start and I was able to write a basic report using this data about which pages are most popular, common navigation paths, etc.
Crazy Egg has a feature measuring "Rage Clicking" That was great! What wasn't great is that our users were doing it a lot :(
Why are they rage clicking?
A heuristic evaluation was perfect for this part, it's fast and cheap (which my budget appreciated).
My goals:
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Find out why they're rage clicking
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Identify usability violations to make sure we solve them
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Scope out any problems I might want to watch out for in the usability test
The Heuristic Evaluation
The Heuristics: Nielsen's Ten Usability Heuristics
The Sample: I chose a representative sample of the pages our website especially focusing on any pages with high "Rage Clicking"
The Deliverable: a report of the heuristic violations under each category, rating them based on severity and suggesting potential improvements.
Summary of Findings
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Confusing Homepage Design: It wasn't clear that this text-heavy page was the homepage.
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Cart Functionality Issues: The cart page lacked a clear checkout button and enough details about items in the cart (this explained our high cart abandonment issue)
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Redundant Navigation Paths: Users encountered multiple ways to access similar content, each with different functionality, which resulted in an inconsistent user experience.
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Suboptimal Search and Filter Experience: The search functionality, particularly the filters was inconsistent (and the filters weren't optimized for what our users like to do)
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Static Visual Design: The website was static and lacked interactivity, with minimal use of dynamic elements. This contributed to a dated and less engaging experience.
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Poor Content Placement: Important content was placed far down on the page and explained underutilization we'd seen on our GA reports.
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Insufficient Error Prevention: The website lacked mechanisms for preventing and recovering from errors.
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Inconsistent Terminology and Labels: The use of terminology and labels across the site was inconsistent, with some elements failing to clearly signify their functions.
Summary of Recommendations
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Redesign the Homepage: Introduce a clear "Management Concepts" heading, reduce the amount of text, and adjust the layout to make it evident that this is the main entry point of the website.
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Improve Cart Usability: Add a conventional checkout button, provide descriptions of items in the cart, and link products to their pages to reduce user confusion and decrease cart abandonment.
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Simplify Navigation: Consolidate redundant navigation paths and ensure that frequently used functions are more prominently featured to streamline the user experience.
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Optimize Search and Filters: Improve the layout and consistency of search filters and explore additional filtering options to enhance the effectiveness of the search function.
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Increase Interactivity: Introduce hover states for buttons, animations for images and text, and other dynamic elements to make the site feel more modern and engaging.
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Reposition Important Content: Move key content higher on the page to increase its visibility.
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Implement Error Prevention Mechanisms: Introduce features like an undo option for cart actions and a "Did you mean?" suggestion in the search bar to enhance user control and recovery from errors.
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Standardize Terminology and Labels: Revise and standardize the terminology and labels across the site to ensure clarity and consistency.
Usability Testing
Heuristic evaluations are great, but they can't replace seeing what problems people actually end up experiencing. This is where the ideas for innovation truly sprout from.
Roadblock!
Government employees are difficult to recruit and I needed every single one that I could get to contribute to personas and journey mapping.
I solved this by identifying areas that I would absolutely need a government-specific viewpoint. For the rest (basic navigation, finding information, our ecommerce experience) most people who take career training would be able to help me find the largest pain points.
While in an ideal world I would use our customers for this too, I needed to prioritize where those participants would be most valuable. I recruited participants from User Interviews and screened for participants who'd recently taken career training in skills that we focus on (like leadership, HR, etc).
The added benefit was since these participants hadn't been students with us before, we could focus on what message the website was currently delivering about who we were as a company.
Details of the Usability Test
The usability test included asking participants to perform the following tasks/questions:
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Can you tell me what this company does?
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What do you think of the website?
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What does each menu item mean?
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Find a course about XYZ
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Where can you learn about coaching for your organization?
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You need to talk to customer service, how would you do that?
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Tell me about your general experience?
Main themes of the usability test:
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The website experience isn't exciting
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Improving search is vital
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The website isn't giving users a good idea of who Management Concepts is
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Not all the terms used on the website make sense to users
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Not all the functions worked the way users expected
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The organization of the website impeded user navigation.
Recommendations (which we implemented on the redesign):
Using these results we were able to inform some of the design of the website update. Particularly it was important that we:
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Highlight who we are as a company more effectively
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Improve the search functionality of the website
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Create intuitive navigation
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Use names and labels that users understand
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Organize the website more intuitively
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Focus more on testing of the website redesign to ensure functions of the website match reality
User Interviews (for personas and journey mapping)
Next, it was time to do some interviews to investigate the personas.
Target Audience: We wanted a mix of customers (working in the United States federal government) who purchased for themselves, people who made bulk purchases for others (in several different volumes).
Recruiting: I sent recruiting emails to customers who'd made recent purchases asking for interviews (and I got sales to help spread the word as well). Overall, I recruited five people in each category (I categorized them based on their purchase data).
Focus: We wanted to hear about the purchase process in general (with a focus on how the website was involved).
I used a Semi-Structured User Interview with these research questions:
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What was their typical purchase process
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What goes on before they make a purchase
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How they decide to buy
Here's how I answered those questions:
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I asked for a detailed walkthrough of their process
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When they mentioned going to the Management Concepts website (everyone did) I asked them to show me what they usually did when preparing for a purchase.
Talking with the users about their process and watching them use the website in an unstructured manner was very insightful. It even helped us breakdown previous assumptions that the people working with sales reps don't use the website. In fact, they used the website to browse their options, but didn't make the purchase there because they viewed it as inconvenient.
From those sessions we not only generated ideas for the website project, but also gave us ideas for several new features to add in future projects.
The Result
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3 new personas
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Super Buyer Steve (a training coordinator)
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Moderate Buyer Maggy (a buyer who buys for coworkers)
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Sally Student (a student who bought for himself)
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3 journey maps (one for each persona)
Some Questions we answered:
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Why users weren't using the website for purchases
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The Impact Word of Mouth Suggestion has
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How users use our website outside of purchases
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Wants and Needs
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What users do between touchpoints with us (including internal approval processes)
The Personas
The personas took the buyer profiles, with their quantitative information, and built upon them to have qualitative flavor.
Each persona consisted of:
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A Bio
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How often they purchased
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How they make the purchase
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What drives the Purchase
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Wants and Needs
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Responsibilities
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How they use the website
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Their frustrations
Here is an Example of what a persona would look like (it's scrubbed of it's data, but it helps show what kind of insights are on the personas).
The Journey Maps
Since we'd asked the user to walk through their process during the interviews, I also created Journey maps to go with each persona.
I was able to map out each customer touchpoint in the buying process as well as what went on for the buyer behind the scenes (offline).
These journeys included:
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The customer touchpoints (including a description of what that consisted of)
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Their feelings during the touchpoints (including a graph of their negative/positive feeling level)
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Some opportunities for improvement
Putting the Data to Use
The discovery stage of this process left me with a ton of research artifacts, I'd done presentations, I had personas, journey maps, reports, and research briefs. All ready to go and be used to design user-focused solutions.
The Challenge: Making sure the data is used
Research is only as valuable as the amount it is used in a project. Because of that, whenever I do research, I am purposeful in how I am going to share the research. I learn the stakeholders I'm working with and their preferences for the way I deliver research. Some teams like presentations, others like research briefs, some teams like a ton of narratives and stories, others want a hard data and facts.
So I'm adaptable.
I make what's best for the consumers of the research.
In this project I worked with the designers a lot. My design team likes when you translate the customer's needs into clear, actionable insights. They like to hear narratives to understand the customer better. I made sure to provide those. In addition, the research went into the research repository for easy access later on.
I did design reviews regularly with the designers (as well as to help them brainstorm solutions). We worked iteratively, and during that process, I ensured customer needs were being considered.
What was the result of this research?
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It made us aware of issues that we have in our roadmap to solve in 2025 (such as difficult internal approval processes for government employees)
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It informed the design of the new website and the features of the website, allowing us to design a better, more user-centric experience
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It improved our understanding of the customer (allowing for more effective marketing campaigns, website copy, and sales tactics
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It let us prioritize which features were the most critical and what we could backlog or save to future iterations