Gaining insights, when you have limited scale

We can probably all agree that data is an important part of developing a digital product, so how do you gain meaningful insight with limited users and no budget?

Like most startups eporta, they had some analytics, but because the numbers were so small it was difficult to gain meaningful insight. When I joined eporta in December 2019, the business had analytics tools in place and had previously conducted some exploratory research into concepts but what they didn’t have was an understanding of whether the product was fulfilling user needs and how we use insight to drive innovation. The below will go through our approach to UX research and some tips on how you can research with a limited scale.

Understanding our users

Our first point of call was to start from the ground up and spend time understanding our users. At eporta we have 2 types of users, our suppliers who manufacture products and buyers who buy products from suppliers, in order to build on the data we had and to create a journey map of our users we decided to firstly focus on our Buyers and to do the following activities:

Conducting exploratory interviews with buyers

We decided, at the beginning to focus mainly on Buyers sett up discovery interviews with buyers to get some real insights into the pain points of buyers and discover opportunities that eporta could potentially capitalise on. The first problem we encountered was that we didn’t have the budget to pay incentives so we had to rely on existing friendly users who were willing to spend 1 hour speaking to us.

Shadowing the account managers on visits

To understand the context in which our users use our products and also how eporta sells and works with its clients we shadowed the account managers on visits and pitch meetings.

We used the findings to create a journey map, this helped us to identify key features and pain points that we needed to address.

Gaining more understanding about our suppliers

At the beginning of the pandemic, the company had to revisit its strategy, which meant a greater focus on our suppliers. Historically they had been largely ignored, as the business belief was that if we focused on the buyer experience it will in turn drive the suppliers’ experience. Now we had to pivot and work on expanding our knowledge of suppliers and their pain points while creating a new proposition for suppliers. As the activity on the platform was relatively low we had to rely on speaking to our suppliers. We selected different suppliers who operated differently and sold a different type of product and conducted the following activities:

Supplier interviews

Using some early prototypes we spoke to different employees within the business to identify the different roles and tasks.

Supplier visits

Site visits allowed us to see suppliers working environment and internal processes, this helped us to think about the context and to design appropriately. For example, if the majority of employees are using multiple programs/tools there could be an opportunity for us to create an API feed so that the employee doesn’t need to go back and forth between programs.

Jobs to be done framework for suppliers

In order to understand more about the decision-makers and their needs, we conducted interviews with them at different stages in the onboarding cycle to understand what key jobs are they want to perform.

Feedback from Account Managers

We also had a slack channel that allowed us to capture feedback that was coming in from the commercial team via suppliers and buyers, this gave us an idea of pain points and allowed us to build on the insight we had gathered previously.

Creating a culture of continuous feedback and insight

The insights we gained helped us to create an environment where we used feedback in all parts of the business. It helped us to make decisions on the roadmap, it also helped us to educate the wider business about our design process and how we made design decisions and validated the product with users. We also started continuously interviewing different users to build on the insights we had.

Combining different types of data to gain insight

We were now in a position where we had a rich combination of feedback coming in from different sources, but we had no way to qualify all the and to bring it together to understand the sources of the insight. We created a research database in notion to bring together research from interviews and the feedback from the slack channel, this allowed the product team to search for a theme and then identify the occasions it was mentioned.

We pulled in the feedback from slack into Notion and added in a severity value so that we could prioritise the feedback.

Measuring success and gathering requirements from the business

In order, to make sure that we were building the right things, we introduced the Opportunity Solution Tree (Read Teresa Torres blog for more information) into our process. The Opportunity Solution Tree became a visual plan of how we were going to reach an outcome, bringing together our insights and also helping us to create a measurable goal.

The measurable goal helped us to understand if our solution worked and also helped us to quickly focus on the right solutions. We then used analytics, user interviews, and Hotjar recordings to see what users were doing, to further validate the solution and monitor its success long term.

“Good product discovery requires discovering opportunities as well as discovering solutions””

— Teresa Torres

Research tools we use

Zoom with transcription

We use Zoom to host and record our sessions, we have paid for a premium account so we don’t have the 40 minute limit for our sessions. We have also brought a license for the transcription feature which means less time spent writing out notes and going through recordings.
You can also try Otter.ai for transcribing recordings which has a limited free plan

Notion

Notion is the central hub that brings all our research together. We use it for all our notes and feedback, and to create links to related content. Using Notion for all our research enabled us to create a tag database that links themes together. Notion has a free personal plan you can try.

Miro

When we first started conducting user interviews we used Miro for note-taking, this allowed us to quickly sort our notes into themes and see the trends. We colour coded the post-it notes and had one board for all the sessions.

Hotjar

Hotjar is great tool to see what users are doing within your product, as we don’t have the scale yet we don’t have that many sessions but it is enough for us to form a hypothesis and then further investigate with user interviews.

Heap

Allows us to compare usage among the different suppliers and to see the impact of a new feature.

Tips for conducting UX research in startups

Use the tools you already have

Before looking for a new tool we looked to the tools we were already using and try to adapt it to our needs. For example, before paying for a premium zoom account, we investigated using Google meet and trying to keep our sessions to 40mins when we found it didn’t work for us we changed tact and tried to find a new tool. For months we were manually writing notes via Miro until we looked at how we could create a more scalable solution.

Work with the other teams to gather insights

A great resource for us was to speak to the commercial team and customer services as they are always in touch with users and often have a good idea of what problems are with the product. We often involve them in workshops and requirement gathering before we speak to users which helps to create a hypothesis.

Use prototypes and concepts to start a conversation

Once we have scheduled a user interview we created a prototype which we knew wasn’t quite right but would be a good conversation starter, which often lead to more fruitful discussions with our users. Once they saw something that wasn’t quite right the user would open up and give insights into how they operate.

I hope this insight into the way we do things at eporta helps, to develop the way you do UX research especially when you have a limited budget and resource and ultimately leads to creating a better product.