Uncovering Consumer Insights in the Packaged Goods Space

Role

UX Researcher

Skills

Usability Testing

User Research

Product Design

Project Type

Sponsored Team Project

As a studio project sponsored by P&G (in partnership with Northwestern University), this project is under an NDA.

This case study will focus on the process rather than the details of the project case itself.

1. Overview

Skills I Utilized Through the Project

2. Working on a Team

Meeting the team, setting expectations, and aligning on the project brief

Working on a team with people from different backgrounds and varying expertise, our first few hours of meeting were focused on getting to know each other

We came together and built a team contract highlighting our values, guidelines for task distribution and conflict resolution, and time and communication expectations. This document enabled us to understand each others’ values, and leverage each member’s strengths through the course of the project.

Understanding the Problem Space

Our team was given a project brief in the home care space

Our primary goal was to understand unmet consumer needs

And use our learnings to design a product as a recommendation to P&G

3. User Research

User Research

Recruiting Consumers for Research

Conducted 8 In Home Visits (IHVs) to interview consumers in their homes

  • Identified key consumers we’d like to learn from

  • Learnt how to design screener surveys to recruit target consumers for research

Our goal was to understand their values, goals, priorities & tradeoffs. Understand how they feel about and approach the “Job To Be Done“, and look for tensions and unmet needs

Brainstorming

A brainstorming session after our first design review. We initially struggled narrowing down on solutions because our project scope was so wide, and we were operating without establishing constraints.

Synthesizing information from the In-Home interviews

  • Grouping ideas and identifying recurring or notable themes

  • Brainstorming and gathering actionable insight from our interviews

  • Identifying pains, gains and tensions in the consumer journey

  • Going back to our user journey + validating or invalidating based on learned information

  • Crafting a user persona based on new information

We conducted usability studies in the form of Central Site Visits (CSVs). Consumers visited our site, where they participated in curated activities aimed at testing our design hypotheses.

Downloading & synthesizing information from the In-Home Visits

  • Grouping ideas and identifying recurring or notable themes

  • Brainstorming and gathering actionable insight from our interviews

  • Identifying pains, gains and tensions in the consumer journey

In Home Visits

Usability Studies

Design Reviews

We participated in 3 sets of design reviews in the prototyping stage, iterating on feedback before coming back for the next design review.

Setbacks

  • A wide open project scope made it hard for us to narrow down our solution in the later stages of the design process

  • Failing to set design constraints early on caused us to explore too many different hypothesis in our design process

  • Our 1st design review fell below expectations ; Causing us to come together as a team to re-evaluate and adjust moving forward

5. Reflection

Reflecting on the process

Working as a team

  • Each person on a team works best in different environments

  • The importance of navigating setbacks and coming back stronger as a team

  • Being proactive and open about communicating

  • Raising your hand up - being a team player

User Research

  • Don’t ask users to compare two prototypes at different levels of fidelity

  • For each question posed to the user, ask yourself what you hope to gain from their answer, and how that information is going to validate or invalidate a hypothesis, or move the product forward

  • Watch what they do not what they say

  • The power of silence - let users lead the conversation

  • Leave your expectations and world view at the door

  • Don’t lecture the users - they are the experts and I am learning from them

  • Doorknob phenomena - users sometimes tend to drop insightful information as they are leaving the interview

  • Keep questions open ended and allow users to drive conversation

Conveying our work to stakeholders

    • Make sure we’re telling a cohesive story - backing product design decisions with user research

    • Ensure the team is aligned on the story (different members may have different mental models of the process and story)

    • Balancing different unique voices on a team, and ensuring everybody is heard. At the same time, being efficient about cutting out noise and narrowing down on ideas with high potential for impact + aligns with research, data and goals

3. Project Brief