Gathering insights to fuel innovation.
I coordinated work across 3 squads to undertake research to identify unmet user needs, providing the business with strong ideas for features with monetisation potential. The work was delivered within tight timeframes and resulted in prioritised feature experiment pathways for each squad.
Role
Lead UX designer, co-ordinating across squads, facilitating ideation within my squad.
Team
UX Researcher, UX Designers (3 squads), PMs, Developers
Challenge
With income primarily from sales fees, Crowdhouse - a property investment platform - planned to diversify and generate income through software feature monetisation.
But with many property platforms offering similar features, often for free, how might we stand out from the competition and provide something worth paying for? This required deep understanding of our users' needs and pain points, to identify where most value could lie.
Impact
Exciting feature ideas generated by 3 squads within a short timeframe
Directly addressing user needs and covering the breadth of the platform.
Enriched, consolidated view of user insights
Giving the business a crucial big picture view of opportunity areas.
Increased understanding of users and enthusiasm across squads and roles
Broader exposure to real user needs built greater understanding beyond this project.
Feature experiment pipelines
* This work was paused when business priorities shifted, but paved the way for further detailed prioritisation, solution design and structured experimentation.
Building transparency and understanding.
The project arrived as an approved 'Bet' from the business, and needed alignment from those actually undertaking the work.
The kick-off ensured everyone understood what we were trying to achieve and how we'd get there, allowing for challenges and input. Our first goal was to uncover our users' biggest un-met needs, likely to be our greatest opportunities for high-value features.
A crucial unplanned step to guide research scoping.
We were delighted to have the go-ahead for foundational research, but needed to tighten the focus to make research sessions feasible.
It made sense to build interviews around gaps and uncertainties in existing research, but we struggled to see the big picture from fragmented usability findings scattered across many Dovetail projects. Our existing journey maps also didn't seem to tell the full story.
I created a shared space to consolidate learnings, with myself and UX Designers from each squad pooling known critical needs and issues across the property buying/ownership journey.
Collaborative user interview planning.
After each squad's UX Designer had waded through the insights and gathered inputs from colleagues, we could spot key areas of uncertainty across the property buying and ownership journey.
With my squad focussing on the earlier phases of the buying journey, I was able to identify our knowledge gaps.
Key knowledge gaps:
Brokers
Private buyers / owners
To give everyone visibility and a chance to input, I set up a shared space for squads to review and input into research questions, plus co-ordinated sessions with our researcher and UX designers to finalise target groups, goals and timeframes.
Building knowledge across the product department.
To increase exposure to our users across the product department, I set up remote observation rooms, created a shared digital notes board and promoted the sessions.
PMs, devs and designers joined and took notes for various sessions, and we summarised together with our UX researcher at the end of each day. A great joint effort that helped to instill learnings and themes more widely.
Clear direction for squad idea generation.
To create something digestible to feed ideation for my squad, I grouped insights relevant to our areas thematically, plotting on our journey map for context, linking to relevant research reports and gathering input into the most critical themes from our UX researcher.
Leading a session to share with the squad opened up discussion, built greater understanding of our users and set the scene for idea generation.
'I want properties with less competition'
A big focus for potential buyers was to find less publicised options, to avoid bidding wars driving prices up.
'I don't want to deal with unreliable buyers/sellers'
Trust was a big theme. No-one wants wasted time, hidden issues or to be tricked into a deal.
'I want to understand the property market'
Recognising good deals needs current knowledge of trends. Not everyone was confident in this.
The Challenges
Few non-professionals considered paid tools
Most were making do with free platforms and resources, though sometimes using laborious processes to compile property information and track the market.
We still saw potential to create great value, however testing willingness to pay would be crucial.
The strength of harnessing different mindsets.
Including the whole squad in ideation builds stronger ownership of our output and encourages more diverse thinking.
I structured the session to include initial solo idea generation, with a second round after sharing our ideas. This encourages wide-ranging individual thinking, plus the chance for ideas to spark interest and be pushed further.
Planned next steps were to allow these ideas to perculate, then assess effort, risk and value more rigorously.
We would use this to plan an experiment pathway, first drawing out the assumptions behind the top ideas, then finding low risk ways to test these assumptions and users' appetite to pay for the features.
The company's focus changed at this point, however, so the work paused here.
Company armed with strong high value feature ideas
Huge effort from all involved allowed impressive progress within a short timeframe, with feature ideas covering the end-to-end user journeys on the platform.
A greater understanding of user needs, pains and biggest gaps
Consolidating and mapping needs and opportunities visually across the whole property investment and ownership journey gave proper focus for future work planning.
Deeper connection with users and renewed enthusiasm throughout department
Involving broad cross-discipline groups and working collectively within a tight timeframe injected energy and a user-focussed mindset across the product squads.
Handling unrealistic timeframes
This project was scoped before my involvement, without time factored in for research planning and recruitment. We fed this back as a learning point. We also under-estimated how much work was involved in piecing together existing fragmented user insights.
Luckily over-running slightly wasn’t a big issue. We knew these steps were important, kept stakeholders in the loop, and actually achieved a great deal in around 6 weeks.
Collaborative work takes time and effort
Although there are huge benefits to working collaboratively, co-ordinating, gathering inputs and aligning views across squads takes additional time and admin. This needs factoring into timeframes.
Research insights — importance of a big picture view
When searching for the strongest opportunities, we initially struggled to see the forest for the trees. Despite all our data and reports, the overarching 'so what?' felt hidden. More current insight analysis tools might make this easier, but the important piece is to keep zooming out, holding a digestible big picture of needs and struggles across all journeys.
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