How discovery research delivered the audience and UX insights critical for building a future vision
Our client
Jane Plan is a DTC weight management brand offering healthy pre-prepared meal delivery subscriptions. Alongside the meals, they help customers develop a positive relationship with eating, creating a key shift in attitude that changes food from something to be feared to something to be celebrated.
The challenge
Jane Plan recently conducted a ‘bold evolution’ project to modernise the brand proposition in order to increase resonance amongst target audiences.
As an online business, the website functions as both the ‘home’ of the brand and a vital hub for customer activities, thus a dramatic redefinition of this space was required to deliver inline with the bold brand evolution.
As their digital partner, we were responsible for defining a first class user experience. We began by running a Discovery Phase to gather the insights critical for defining a solution matched to both customer and organisational needs.
Why start with a Discovery Phase?
To deliver new value to customers, we believe you need to begin by evaluating the current experience. Identifying moments in the journey that are causing frustration, delight or indifference - these emotions indicate the peaks and troughs in the experience and when we have a clear view of where the experience is letting users down we can ask ourselves:
What would this experience look like if it was all delightful?
What are the changes we could make to lift these experiences?
The ultimate goal here is to identify how we can elevate the ‘troughs’ in the current user experience which will in turn elevate the whole experience.
Moreover, by tightly dovetailing research insights with business objectives, we can provide clients with the direction and confidence to pursue bold changes. This becomes the foundation of the UX strategy.
Research activities
To build this view of the frustrations and delights, we sought to learn that what and why of this customer landscape:
- What is their mental model for creating their own monthly menu and how can we better match and facilitate that through the interface?
- What are their unmet needs as they go about researching, customising and purchasing this product?
- Why is there such a high level of customer support calls regarding basic product information?
- Why are there such low levels of engagement with the weight loss support tools?
- What specifically about the current website interface is causing friction?
- What does a ‘great experience’ look like for them?
Combining quantitative and qualitative = a robust understanding
We conducted a suite of research and analysis activities to provide both qualitative and quantitative data. Along with providing the inputs for customer journey mapping exercises, these activities were designed to gather information to inform and help prioritise site interface, messaging and functionality changes.
Activities conducted to support reaching these goals were:
Site performance review
Heuristic review - Document and prioritise UX issues and optimisation opportunities of the current website. What are the immediate low cost - high value optimisation opportunities?
- Site heatmaps, scrollmaps & recordings - Evaluate user engagement with page content - how far are they scrolling down? Was vital information being missed? Are they clicking where we expect?
- Onsite Polls - Unearth hidden bugs or frustrations with exit polls. What patterns and themes can we see in feedback comments?
- Google Analytics - Map out key visited pages, learn more about the visitor audience demographics and device usage. What are our benchmark metrics against which progress and success can be measured?
In depth interviews
Customers
We ran 10 remote interviews with new and potential Jane Plan customers. The interviews began with a number of tasks on the Jane Plan and rival sites followed by a broader exploration of their dieting experiences. Here we are gathering stories of the lived experience of the product - findings which contribute towards building a picture of what is the cause of frustration, delight or indifference.
Support staff
Next, we interviewed support staff - a critically important function of the brand experience as they are the customer facing voice of the brand and are responding daily to the needs and frustrations of customers. Here we gathered findings on common questions and issues, customer expectations and frustrations as well as seeking to learn how their operational experience could be improved:
“What three changes to the site or the back office system would dramatically improve your work?”
“What common queries or tasks are consuming the lion’s share of your time?”
Customer survey
We identified key findings from the depth interviews to follow up with a survey. This allowed us to reach a wider audience in order to clarify findings from the interviews.
We surveyed over 300 newly signed up customers. Respondents were asked about:
- Experience of purchasing a plan and building a menu
- The impact of support calls on their progress
- How useful and usable the account area tools were
- How they managed their monthly menu updates
Research findings
During synthesis, we used the inputs from the research to build a map of the current customer experience spanning the end to end customer journey from ‘introductions’ to ‘evolution’.
This exercise helped to identify and clearly illustrate the peaks and troughs in the customer experience for this audience segment - ‘Helen’ - who represents the brand’s key archetype. It proved a powerful way to summarise the research findings to our client.
Client playback: Storytelling for impact
Playback to the client was a combined presentation, Q&A and brainstorm session supported by the research document.
We created rich, visual documentation of the findings for sharing and re-use across the organisation.
The document was divided into chapters that followed the customers steps from awareness to delivery. To ensure the experience of their customer was always at the centre of the story, each chapter of the report with a snapshot of how the customer experience.
Impact
The client was absolutely delighted with the learnings shared through the research process and indeed report. It has shown them how a first class website and experience will help them service their customers better. The Jane Plan team refer to the report as
“ This research is ‘The Bible’ for building our customer experience”
We have subsequently been asked to run through these findings to onboard a number of 3rd party agencies who are supporting Jane Plan with brand and marketing activities.
Confidence for bold ideas
Moreover, by combining quantitative and qualitative research that tightly dovetails with their business objectives, it has given them the confidence to pursue bold changes to the very structure of the customer experience - in particular, we are now ideating on how we can dramatically improve the experience of selecting meals - a key moment in the purchase journey.
Ready to take action?
To see if a Discovery Phase would help transform and add value to your business, schedule a call with Jonathan McNamara, RetroFuzz CEO.
