Delving into the depths of market and user research to discover desires and pain points, to identify market gaps, and to inspire an offering that 'hits the spot'
Project scope
'Why are there so many unhappy customers, and what are they ultimately looking for?'
My small startup wanted to understand what had given rise to a soaring population of disillusioned customers in China’s massive knowledge entertainment (hereby 'KE') industry, a market of 68 billion RMB (~£84 billion), reflected by increasingly volatile numbers of subscription in the KE product sphere and frustration spilling over in reviews across brands. We wanted to know why many customers felt a sense of futility in their hunt for 'worthy' products, to grasp the potential of creating an offering that would positively transform experiences.
Understand and categorise KE user types, motivations, goals, needs and challenges
Analyse competing products across markets to highlight gaps / unsatisfied needs for development opportunities
Investigate common usability and UX issues that caused low conversion rates, drop-offs & product switching
Organise insights to ideate solutions with available resources, creating a sustainable business model
This was my first commercial UX project, a business challenge that transformed my academic research mindset. I cofounded an EdTech startup with Cambridge Filmworks and learned hands-on how to work with stakeholders and constraints to achieve goals via smaller deliverables.
Set to compete against well-recognised competitors, I approached product development with a UCD framework, drawing on my expertise in multiple methods while reviewing our branding and marketing strategy.
Surveys
Focus groups & 1-1 interviews
Data synthesis
Creation of design artefacts: Personas, journey maps, statements, storyboards
Competitor analysis
Ideation workshops
Given our preliminary understanding, I believed we must triangulate methods, data and investigators to understand the reach of KE products, why many were missing the mark, and what ultimately characterised good experience in customer contexts.
Surveys
A fundamental step in kickstarting the project was to better understand KE customer groups without tying ourselves to product specifications. I designed and administered an online survey (multiple choice, text entry, Likert scale) via WeChat within our team's established networks - 11 universities, 3 alumni associations and 6 professional associations. We also collected analytics from four KE companies' public reports to cover a wider range of users.
I analysed demographics, motivations, search trends, popular contents, content formats, pricing and KE experiences. The results pointed to areas to further investigate by user interviews (points 3-6):
90% consumers aged 21-60, over 65% female
79% held a university degree or above, spread across Tier 1-3 cities
KE motivations:
Social expectations
Fear, anxiety, and perceived need to upskill (highly correlated)
Professional development requirements
Absence of time and distance constraints
General topics of widest reach and highest popularity:
Psychology
Health (diet and fitness)
Education (child and teenage contexts)
Language learning
Business and future of work
Technology
Personal finances
Arts (relevance to daily life)
98% used mobile for KE over twice a week; 91% not fully satisfied with current KE experience
Pricing models of popular products varied but followed a similar pattern (details omitted here)
19
Organisations involved
19
Question items
400+
Survey responses
Focus groups & interviews
Targeting 4 customer types from initial data, we recruited a sample of 5-6 KE users under each category to conduct online focus groups. I also conducted nine 1-1 interviews—7 with users and 2 with domain experts—to reduce the effects of social desirability bias, probing participants to dive deeper and elaborate on individual thoughts without being swayed by group opinions. I developed a topic guide for all the interviews to be semi-structured and shared questions in advance, facilitating discussions and ensuring equal participation (a strong teaching background proved helpful!).
Apart from unearthing edge cases, underrepresented groups (e.g. the unemployed and the over-50s) and market gaps, the sessions elicited interesting, in-depth thought processes behind common user behaviour and decisions:
Consumers felt a strong need to 'keep up' constantly, due to a national and social atmosphere that encourages personal development. However, they associated learning with serious commitments, and felt unable to commit due to busy schedules (family, social and work), travel distances and/or limited budgets. This is true regardless of SES backgrounds, professions and employment status.
As a compromise, consumers looked for lighter-weight knowledge contents to 'fill the empty void' or compensate for missed opportunities. Most used fragmented time to ‘watch something useful’ on the mobile phone, to feel good—they wanted to avoid wasting time and evade the pain of formal learning simultaneously.
However, consumers struggled to find consistently satisfactory products. Widespread KE were mostly undeserving ('pseudoscientific' or 'full of false information') and easily forgettable. On the other hand, useful contents were often poorly delivered or presented, with functions that were unengaging or difficult to use. This left users bored and feeling they neither 'learnt something new' nor enjoyed the experience.
11
Interviews conducted
6
Topics covered
23
Users interviewed
The surveys and interviews generated a lot of raw data, which my team had to organise in the absence of data analysis software back then. I held two affinity diagramming workshops where we collaborated in grouping and clarifying clusters of information.
From the affinity diagrams, we built 4 aggregated empathy maps and 4 personas to represent our target audience. I created a summary of themes, problem and goal statements, and 4 journey maps. These design artefacts became our key reference points throughout product development.
I developed a template for us to build 4 personas, presented to Production, Devs and Content teams so that we would keep the end users in mind. Going forward, we constantly went back to remind ourselves of who we were designing for, to ensure our decision making was centred on real user needs and not our ego.
Example persona of 'Proactive Manager'
Example problem statements
Our goal statement
I carefully composed a problem statement for each persona by highlighting their most significant traits, goals, needs, motivation and challenges. Once the problems were identified and clearly articulated, I collated the unaddressed needs and challenges to create a goal statement—this conveyed the unique value we could potentially offer.
The statements not only focused the team on ideating for the right opportunities, but also framed the characteristics of our offering. Prevented from meandering, the stakeholder's morale was kept high.
I mapped out 4 customer journeys to visualise different users' stages of behaviour and decision making. The artefacts enable us to understand tasks undertaken to achieve goals and mental states in context, to spot pain points and opportunities more easily, to take ownership of process stage, and to shape a smoother overall experience flow.
Example customer journey of 'Aspiring Entrepreneur' (translated & key info removed)
Initial findings: Pain points
I composed a bullet-point-style summary of themes and important findings that emerged in our affinity diagram. CX and UX pain points, in particular, were later included in our pitch to investors.
9
Competitors analysed
13
UX criteria applied
21
Users interviewed
We needed to understand the range of features, functions, and flows of competing products, as well as the emotions evoked, to create superior experience in these aspects. It was hence critical to perform a detailed competitive analysis to yield strategic insights into how we could better craft and adapt our solution.
I compared our main competitors against established UX criteria, combining data from our desk research and from reports of diverse institutions and marketing agencies. I assessed the strengths and weaknesses by quantitative (ease of key task ratings by steps, app store ratings, pricing, NPS) and qualitative analysis (functionalities, features, brand tones).
The analysis revealed the ways current competition has failed to meet user needs, providing us with a clear picture to define our unique value propositions and marketing strategy: a concurrently reliable, high quality, inclusive, and interdisciplinary knowledge brand. It also informed our design components, brand image, tone and logo. For our pitch deck, I created grids to visualise our product position in the local and international space.
Example of visualised of UVP in our BP
Presentation of UVP in our BP
Ideation workshops
Brainstorming
With clearly-defined problems to solve, we moved on to ideation referring back to the design artefacts created.
I involved 4 users to join all members of our startup and business partners to attend two brainstorming workshops, where we used Crazy Eights and How-Might-We to sketch solutions. Also, we established selection criteria for content development, including topics, lecturers and presentation formats.
My crazy 8 sketching on a chocolate bar wrapper
Impact-effort matrix
I gathered the ideas on an impact–effort matrix for us to prioritise quick win ideas considering our UVP and team's capacity. In the end, we put together our product requirements and (fitting functionalities and features) and a content inventory on a spreadsheet, leaving out some fill-in and big bet ideas for later iterations.
Impact-effort matrix in progress (translated)
My storyboard for 'Tired-out Commuter '
As part of an exercise to immerse ourselves in the UX, we drew big-picture storyboards to include contextual challenges, pain points, and potential types of interactions our user would encounter. This helped to align stakeholder visions on core principles in our design to deliver the value that was missing in the market.
Impact
The valuable research insights helped us reach 10 million RMB company valuation within 6 months.
We won over China's Tongji University venture accelerator, Tongji National Science Park and several private investors to secure seed funding and bring our ideas forward.
Next step: Product development
Enable users across age and professions to access contents easily, online or offline, in a variety of daily contexts (e.g. commutes, queues, waits) via the mobile phone—users can view or listen in bitesize formats on a single platform.
Ensure all contents are reliable, generated and reviewed by highly esteemed experts in field, and relevant to consumers—users should find consistency in top-notch content quality throughout the platform and channel.
Prioritising the ease and painlessness of learning, allowing individual pace and flexibility—our product should be well suited to the interested laymen and available at prices far more affordable than traditional courses.
Hosting all contents on a reliable platform which features useful tools that facilitate learning—our topics should be highly relevant to the user with a focus on practicality, and the modes of delivery must engage as well as entertain users.
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