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Chapter (2)
My Case Studies


Case study: Redefining the problem statement and transforming the research approach


Background

A client operated a data analytics platform designed for teachers to aid school improvement initiatives. This platform allows users to access, download, and interpret data related to schools and students. The client’s primary motivation was to streamline the internal development process.

Challenges

  • The last discovery was conducted eight years ago for a different version of a product that has been redesigned and rescoped multiple times since then, yet there was no evidence to confirm whether the current version is fit for purpose today.
  • User groups were poorly defined, and personas were not fit for purpose, focusing on job roles rather than behaviours.
  • The problem space remains inadequately defined.
  • Broader stakeholders are not aligned on the strategic approach.
  • There is a limited budget for research and a fully resourced team.
  • No budget for participants’ incentives and no established recruitment routes.

Impact

  • The definition of a problem statement facilitated strategic alignment among broader stakeholders, shifting the focus from a business-led approach to genuinely addressing user problems.
  • A comprehensive review of historical user needs, combined with newly developed behavioural personas and ways of working maps, clarified the products’ value and highlighted opportunities for addressing real user problems whilst fulfilling organisational objectives.

Timeline

  • Stakeholder interviews, collaborative workshops (x 6), gap analysis (August 2024 - September 2024).
  • Discovery research (September 2024 - December 2025).

Objectives

Workshops
  • Define user groups.
  • Understand the business and user problems.
  • Prioritise user problems according to impact.
  • Create an overarching problem statement.
  • Understand the assumptions surrounding the problem spaces.
  • Define success metrics.

Discovery
  • Define and review historical and newly discovered user needs.
  • Map out users’ ways of working by user group.
  • Understand the impact of user problems on users’ day-to-day operations.
  • Identify pain points and frictions in the existing user journeys.
  • Understand desired functionalities for data analysis and interpretation.

Survey
  • Identify the biggest user pain points.
  • Understand which product features are the most valuable for data management and interpretation in our and competitors’ products.

Planning

  • Worked with product and delivery managers to identify and engage key stakeholders and influencers, conducting one-to-one interviews to build rapport, gather strategic goals, and support meaningful changes for users.
  • Reviewed historical research, historical user groups and personas and highlighted gaps.
  • Created research timeline shared with other team members.
  • Created and mananed Jira research items, kept track of progress and sign posted research deliverables.
  • Conducted a series of collaborative stakeholder workshops (x 6), fostered discussion between misaligned stakeholders, facilitated shift towards the right approach by explaining the gaps and redefinition of a problem statement that reflected both, business and user needs.
  • Ensured GDPR compliance by liaising with the Data Protection Officer highlighting the implications of data collection and sharing for a user.
  • Revisited user landscape with wider stakeholders and identified behavioural overlaps and differences based on shared goals.
  • Created participant criteria, highlighted quotas based on user groups and the selected research methods.
  • Created a research plan based on feedback from product managers, service owner, UX designer, and developers.
  • Prepared discussion guides and gathered feedback from stakeholders throughout the process, ensuring that everyone gained valuable insights from the research.

Recruitment

  • Defined the recruitment strategy with restrictions on not providing incentives and not having an established user pool.
  • Reviewed historical user lists and contacted various stakeholders to gain access to users from internal databases. 
  • Verified if these potential participants agreed to be contacted by a third party for research purposes.
  • Combined suitable contacts and verified existing information to see if they matched our participant criteria.
  • Created screener and consent forms in Qualtrics, sent out the screener, and tracked the responses.
  • Sent out consent forms and tracked who returned them prior to the research session. 
  • Followed up with users to ensure all consent forms were collected before the research session.
  • Automated scheduling of research sessions via Calendly

Field Work

A mixed-methods research design, encompassing both inductive and deductive approaches, to understand the bigger picture and then quantify preferences for new features.

Discovery methods
  • In-depth one-to-one interviews to understand users' attitudes, pain points and their impact, as well as the features they use in our product and elsewhere.
  • Contextual inquiries to grasp users’ ways of working and how they use the product, how it fits into their environment, and what barriers they face. 
  • Survey to quantify desired functionalities that could be put forward to the prototyping stage.

Analysis & Synthesis

  • Produced note-taking template for observers based on stakeholder preference.
  • Created analysis & synthesis board on Lucid.
  • Conducted thematic analysis and created a compelling narrative answering the research objectives and assumptions.
  • Created user workflows for different user groups.
  • Reviewed and simplify the existing personas based on behavioural characteristics.
  • Please follow my approach to survey analysis in the Analysis section here.

Insight sharing

  • Created reports in PowerPoint.
  • Regular Show and Tell sessions to maintain momentum and foster ongoing conversations and alignment.

Insight to action

  • Facilitated collaborative prioritisation workshop with all stakeholders, based on user impact, business impact, and relative effort.

Deliverables

  • Overarching problem statement,
  • map of unmet user needs,
  • prioritisation of user needs,
  • behaviour based personas,
  • strategic research roadmap,
  • workshop pack (ppt),
  • research playbacks (ppt).

Collaboration

  • Engineers & developers,
  • product managers,
  • service owner,
  • data analytics team,
  • policy team,
  • scrum master,
  • UX designer
  • data protection officer.

LinkedIn︎
07 999 744 047
katotcenas@gmail.com
Based in East London

© 2024 Katarina Otcenasova