Fast facts
Role:
Lead product designer
Deliverables:
Strategy, User interviews, Workshop hosting, department liaison and knowledge share.
Team:
Product manager, and myself.
Year:
2020
Define
Pooling from the knowledge across the company, we hosted workshops with senior stakeholders and department heads. What feedback, and trends were they seeing?
This enabled us to glean insight from quantitative sources such as customer service tickets, sales data, social interactions geographical delivery locations. As well as qualitative - door step drop off conversations, 100+ hours of historical customer interviews, and original brand vision and market research.
Leveraging this research, we then developed customer profiles that captured behaviours from pre to post-purchase and beyond. However, the ultimate experts on our customers are our customers. After drafting initial outlines for comprehensive customer profiles, including concerns and motivations, we engaged directly with our customers to validate our understanding. How did our insights align with reality?
Creating customer personas helped us build empathy and a shared team language for discussing service decisions, effectively bringing customers into every business discussion.
This deepened our understanding of their goals and challenges, like home ownership versus renting, or outdoor versus indoor planting.
With 11 personas, we identified some as new business opportunities to be sized and investigated, and refined our focus to three primary personas that aligned with our company mission most closely . This significantly impacted our backlog and prioritisation. In many ways identifying the personas that weren’t our primary focus was even more important that aligning on those that were.
Now we knew our customers and who to focus on, we aimed to understand their goals better. From workshop and interview insights, we identified 10 primary jobs to be done.
The jobs-to-be-done framework expanded our view of competition and highlighted unique ways plants can solve customer problems. For example - Why would a customer choose to decorate their space with a plant vs a cushion?
Unearthing elements that feel obvious when you live and breathe a plant company but should really be core things we celebrate and communicate.
This revealed functional, emotional, personal, and social aspects of their decision-making.
We then prioritised three primary jobs for further investigation, that aligned most closely with our existing strategy.
We understood our customers and why they chose plants over other solutions. Next, we needed to assess how well Patch was supporting our customers with their goals.
Enter customer stories: a blend of personas and jobs to be done. These stories added context, detailing how customers wanted to achieve their goals and their challenges, providing a tangible lens for analysing our offering through.
We created user flows that touched on every part of the customers journey that they would need to undertake in order find a solution to the customer story.
We then hosted company wide drop in sessions where everyone could share their insights and thoughts on friction points and elements we received positive feedback on.
This in conjunction with end to end mystery shopping, hotspot analysis, customer interviews, cross department data analysis (Quantitative and qualitative).
Meant our insights were rooted in research and covered the full end to end experience of our customers.
We captured over 180 problems and opportunities to improve the customer experience. This list we categorised by department and were able to circulate. On some of the smaller and more straightforward elements we were able to start making improvements instantly.
However to make the findings more manageable as a whole, we grouped them into 18 themes. Such as decorate, level up and healthy plants etc. Within each theme there was a collection of problem statements. A summary of evidence and how might we’s to springboard critical thinking. These themes then fed into company wide initiatives or focuses for quarters.
We then scored each problem statement within these themes using the RICE framework where we analysed the Reach, Impact, Confidence and Effort, with the impact score being based on how much impact fixing the issue would have on improving the customer experience.
Problem Statement
Summary
We are good at getting people to the right room. However we don’t do a great job of helping people understand if the products are right for the particular spot they have in mind. We heard comments in our customer interviews and through customer service, that it is hard to visualise size from our dimensions, and it seems to be an area of friction and confusion in our current user journey. Size of individual products, and how they fit together in combination, as well as understanding growth are all important considerations our customers talked about in the interviews when they are deciding whether products are right for them. This is also an area where we are at a significant disadvantage to in-person shopping.
Problem Statement
Why I am proud of this project
From talking solutions to talking customer problems
In a startup, speed is key, often creating tension between research and output. While we tested solutions and talked to customers during design, we rarely sized and investigated which problems were the most pressing for us to solve from our customers perspective. Stepping back for our customer experience review allowed us to build a backlog of customer-focused problems . As a company we then decided on problems to prioritise (not solutions) giving the product team space to ideate. This led to better, more impactful solutions.
Increasing cross department collaboration
The customer experience review marked a massive step change for my working practice. While collaborating closely to understand our customer and service better, we all gained a better understanding of each departments ways of working, tools, focus and skill sets. Now we knew these practices existed we integrated them into the way the product team drove decisions and gleaned insight. It also opened the doors to other teams utilising our tools. With cross department sit ins on our monthly customer interview sessions to name one. Driving real impact for our customers.
Bridging the gap between customer and employee
Unlike many in the company, as part of the product team, I regularly spoke with customers. Which meant that I often received all the passionate praise from customers about how much they loved what we did. This praise was a reflection of the hard work that everyone put in and it was great to share this with everyone. I also enjoyed bringing customers closer to all employees by sharing insights with bite-sized videos of customers describing or experiencing problems. This impactful approach made our findings compelling and boosted our team's credibility, showing that our claims were rooted in research.
