Chapter (2)
My Case Studies

Case study: Navigating midlife transitions: A comprehensive approach from concept to launch

Background

Since 2020 more people in midlife are exiting the workplace, or not returning to the workplace post pandemic. This is having a long-term effect on their future retirement income, current health and macro living conditions.

HMW: How might we create a digital tool to support customers of all ages to reflect on the current state of their career, finances and health so that they take appropriate action to improve their situation and remain in work longer?

Prioritised solution: a digital service covering 3 areas: work, health and money.

Challenges

Fixed product name that may have excluded the assumed target audience,
disengaged stakeholders,
limited budget for survey participants,
once released, one of the pages was underperforming.

Impact

Insights and deliverables contributed to a better understanding of target audience across different teams which in turn served as:

A template for the StratComms team to refine the language of the campaign and create relatable ads,
Identified target audience based on two main archetypes distinguished by mindsets and consequent behaviours.
Influenced marketing strategy to target younger audiences than initially assumed,
Change of the initially proposed language to one that resonates with users,
Increased views of the underperforming page,

Accelerated changes in the content of a nationwide offline version of the service.

Timeline

The project ran for 10 months. During this time the research covered:

Discovery & Alpha (February 2023 – June 2023)
Public beta (July 2023 – November 2023)

Objectives

Discovery

Understand the user needs and pain points.
Identify appropriate language that resonates with users.
Identify impactful content by understanding gaps in users knowledge on the topic.
Understand barriers for future life planning and identify support opportunities.

Identify target audience, appropriate language, marketing channels, and relevant content.

Alpha

Evaluate content relevancy and desirability.
Identify preferred way of reviewing content.
Evaluate content relevancy and usability.

Live

Assess desirability of the Work pillar.
Identify gaps and oppourtunities to develop the Work pillar further.
Evaluate usabiity and desirability of the new functionality (personalised content).

Planning

Conducted one-to-one interviews to build rapport, gather strategic goals, and support meaningful changes for users.
Ensured GDPR compliance by liaising with the Data Protection Officer.
Created research timeline in conjunction with other designers to reflect dependencies between the crafts.
Created and mananed Jira research items, kept track of progress and sign posted research deliverables.
Facilitated a collaborative workshop to understand the user landscape, problem space, assumptions, and research questions.
Built a business case to increase the restrictive sampling from 250 to 500 due to findings being applicable to the general population.
Created user groups, participant criteria, and highlighted quotas based on user groups and the selected research method.
Before usability testing, I created an assumption workshop in Mural to align the product owner, delivery manager, service designer, content designer, and UX designer, which helped me develop research objectives for the usability test.
Created a research plan that based on our converstaions with StratComms (marketing), product owner, content & service designer.
Prepared discussion guides and gathered feedback from stakeholders along the way.

Recruitment

Liaised with the recruitment agency to coordinate our research needs.
Provided screener questions.

Regularly reviewed the participants provided, ensuring they matched our participant criteria.
Scheduled participants and created a sign-up sheet for wider stakeholders.
Throughout these stages, I collected qualitative feedback from over 55 users across 4 user groups and ran a survey with a sample of 450 users.

Field work

I opted for a mixed-methods research design, encompassing both inductive (interviews, focus group) and deductive approaches (survey, usability testing, concept testing), appropriate in different stages of the product development.

Discovery methods

One-to-one interviews to dive into users’ motivations, attitudes, and past behaviours, and barriers to plan for the future.
Survey to gather robust evidence for suggested content and language changes and to gather preferences on the proposed look and feel moving to alpha.