The Ask

Insureon’s digital team had begun a full site redesign but realized that they did not have a firm grasp on who their users are. Leadership reached out to us to provide them with foundational insights about who their users are and what they need.

Project: Customer segmentation research for web application redesign
Primary role: UX researcher
Skills: In-depth interviewing, remote user research, project management
Tools: Sketch, Miro, teleconferencing, video conferencing
Outcome: Detailed report and workshop with insights and action items

Team Process

As the two members of the research team live in different cities, the research process was predominately remote. We held two onsite meetings with the client—one kickoff meeting and one final presentation meeting. All working sessions, interviews, and other meetings were held via phone or video call. To facilitate communication and information sharing we used Slack, Zoom, Miro, and Dropbox.

This remote-first process worked very well and included one large, full team debrief and analysis session, which we did virtually to cut down on pass through travel expenses to the client. We anticipated some of the communication and logistical challenges and appointed an onsite team member to help us facilitate. The session was successful in that it both strengthened client team member buy-in and helped solidify the research team’s preliminary analysis of the data. We successfully navigated the two difficulties we faced—lost time due to technical issues and slower ideating due to choppy communication; however, the experience reiterated our preference for holding such sessions in person.

Kickoff Meeting – Onsite

After agreeing on a general scope of the contract, my research partner and I held a kick-off meeting and a series of interviews with team members in order to learn about the team’s interests in the research and their current knowledge and assumptions about their users. We also were keen to build rapport and make sure that the research project would have buy-in from the entire team. To do this we held a workshop in which company leadership, team members and researchers brainstormed and mapped out our collective understandings of what we wanted to get out of the project and what success would look like.

After the kick-off meeting our two-person research team went over notes, read through existing market research, and did comparative analysis of competitors’ websites. We then decided that the most appropriate research intervention for the client’s specific context would be to adopt a Jobs-to-be-Done (JTBD) approach.

Methodology

JTBD

The JTBD approach focuses on learning about successful user/customer experiences in order to gain insights about the types of behaviors and actions that structure the paths with the most desired outcomes. We decided that JTBD would be the most helpful place to start based on the fact that team members all described feeling as if they were designing in the dark. Knowing who they were reaching would give them a clearer sense of what they had been doing successfully and a solid grounding for targeting the next steps in their redesign as well as identifying areas for future research and experimentation.

Recruitment

In order to get the most appropriate participants for the research goals, we worked with the client’s data analyst to identify customers who met the following criteria: purchase of a policy within 60 days, purchase of one of the top five selling policies, and business location in a state with top five highest numbers of customers. We then selected participants by age of business and industry to make sure we got several people from our client’s target industry in addition to a representational range of industries.

We conducted 10 hour-long interviews with customers who had purchased at least one policy from Insureon in the past 60 days. As the JTBD approach is based on detailed information on step-by-step processes, we first targeted customers who had purchased within 30 days and subsequently expanded our search to those who had purchased within 60 days in order to expedite the recruitment and interview process.

We used MailChimp and SurveyMonkey to recruit and screen participants. Upon confirmation NDAs were sent to participants. A day before the interview we sent out reminder emails with the time and Zoom link; we also prompted participants to sign their NDAs if they had not already done so.

Interview Protocol

The development of our interview protocol was based upon three priorities: creation of a comfortable rapport with the interviewee, compilation of purchase journey histories, and insight into experiences with the client’s brand and service recognition and their recollection/assessment of the website.

Interviews and Debriefing

Client team members were encouraged to sit in on at least three interviews as silent observers. We made sure to make participants aware of observers, and toward the end of each interview we also allowed the observers to send us questions via Slack. After the interviews we held 20-30 minute long debriefing sessions with the observers in order to collect as broad a range of insights as possible as well as to reinforce the agency of the client team in the production of the research findings. This was a central concern for us during the project: we wanted to make sure the client team felt like they had a stake and a generative role in the research process.

After all interviews were conducted we assigned aliases to all of the participants to further insure privacy as well as to remove any biases team members may have developed during interview observations.

Synthesis

We presented the team with General Insights on strengths and areas for improvement, offering recommendations for messaging and content strategy, data capture, branding opportunities, and service and marketing strategy. Finally, we articulated four UX research Next Steps for the client to pursue in order to effectively operationalize the study’s findings and insights.

Deliverables

Jobs-to-be-Done

We identified three primary JTBDs that customers came to Insureon to do. To reinforce this key insight, we created empathy posters and printed sets for the team to put up around the office as constant reminders of what their users are looking to do.

User Journeys and Personas

To give the client a slight different perspective on their customers, we also provided them with three sets of user journeys and personas.

Participant One-Sheets

Stakeholders less involved in the research process occasionally ask to see the data behind the deliverables. In anticipation of such a request and recognizing the challenges of making sense out of reams of qualitative data, we compiled ‘one-sheets’ for each of the study’s participants. These one-sheets contain short paragraph summary, a timeline, a list of insights, and a table of the participant’s ‘blockers’ and ‘motivators’ regarding their purchase. With these one-sheets stakeholders and other interested persons have access to the underlying data that is easy to connect to the study’s findings and deliverables.

Findings and Recommendations

We shared our insights, UX recommendations, and suggestions for further study in a written report, as well as an in-person presentation working session to ensure that stakeholders would commit to acting on the research findings. After the formal presentation, we led the team in a commitment exercise. Each team member identified an area under their responsibility on which one or more of the research findings could be applied.

As our work with the team had concluded, we asked team leaders to commit to scheduling follow up meetings with each team member within two weeks to check up on the progress and initial results of the team’s incorporation of the research.

User research and customer segmentation project