36% boost in user conversion at Flamme

As one of two UX researchers, we were responsible for:

• understanding user motivations, expectations, engagement patterns, roadblocks

So we assessed engagement and experience with methods like:

• creating and analyzing surveys

• running and analyzing interviews

• collaborating with design, marketing, project management, engineering, CEO

• providing actionable recommendations

Objective:

The primary goal was to quickly identify usability issues through heuristic analysis and find conversion issues, then gain deeper insights into user motivations, expectations, and engagement patterns through an engagement interviews. 

Methodology:

Step 1 - Collaborative Stakeholder Meetings: Crafting the Research Plan

• Collaborated with the Project Manager, CEO, Marketing, and Design teams to define research objectives and plan.

• As a startup with limited resources and a need for quick turn around we opted to use multiple methods to gather data.

Methods Used:

• Heuristic Evaluation: Quick and cost-effective, providing feedback to the team while waiting for user insights.

  • Severity Scale: Ranging from 0 (no usability problem) to 4 (major usability problem), help feature prioritization.

• Survey: Using social media and email campaign for consistent quantitative data on user type, app journey, and valuable features.

  • survey had a screener to funnel in users who were highly engaged for an optional 30 minute moderated interview

• 30 min Moderated Virtual Interviews: Going deeper into user experiences, pain points, and values.

Step 2 - Guideline Creation and Survey Setup: Ensuring Clarity

We created discussion guidelines to streamline the survey and email blast flow, setting objectives for the moderated interviews. We used:

• MailChimp 

• Google Survey 

• Calendly

• Zoom/Google Meets

We prioritized questions that gave us the most insight on the most valuable features and onboarding roadblocks.

Step 3 - Facilitating Virtual User Interviews: Gathering Insights

With limited start up funding, we expected our largest roadblock to be recruitment. So we tried different methods to encourage participation:

• altruistic push: "share your advice because you care"

• gift card raffles

• future app discounts 

Overall, we collected 30 responses from the survey blast and conducted 10 30-minute moderated interviews.

Step 4 - Analysis and Recommendations: Enhancing Engagement and Conversion

Analyzed and summarized key insights from survey responses and interview data.

• Quantitative survey responses: metric and percentage analysis in excel

• Qualitative interview data: transcribed and analyzed using virtual whiteboarding via Miro, followed by thematic synthesis

Other deliverables:

• Customer Journey Map

• User Persona

Presented evidence-based findings, accompanied by recommendations to boost engagement and conversion.

Results

Previous data via MixPanel suggested that a large portion of the conversion drop-off during onboarding was connected to "partner linking".

We reviewed the onboarding steps in our heuristic evaluation and found a few opportunities for rapid improvements with the flow to enhance usability such as:

• prioritizing partner linking by changing the order of onboarding (before notifications, instead of after)

• making the description of "partner linking" more visible and easier to understand its purpose

We were able to identify the most valuable features in the app based on insights:

• We recommended the team to prioritize any pipeline updates and bug fixes focused on these features.

After two weeks of implementing the research recommendations, we saw a 36% boost in user conversion on the app.

Next Steps:

With user research becoming an important piece in our product development, we plan to follow up in future sprints with:

• Usability Studies: Using A/B testing to measure the effects of different feature designs

• Monetization Studies: Exploring user sentiment toward the app value and cost

• Acquisition studies: Understanding how current users are acquired and how to apply that with new users