At 1stdibs, the Research is on the Wall
How user research x good storytelling impacts product at 1stdibs
Imagine you’re in the market to buy a car. What questions would you have? What research would you do? You might ask about gas mileage or fees. You might want to give it a test drive. Now, imagine that you are buying a used car. Online. For your boss. You probably want to drive it around for a week before handing over the keys. This is the analogy I use to describe the risk interior designers take on when they are shopping for vintage and antique furniture online for their clients. The spaces they are designing are where their clients will entertain friends, relax, and raise their families, and the stakes to create a smooth experience from end to end are high.
What are the Jobs (Literal and Subtle) Your Users are Trying to Do?
At 1stdibs, an online luxury marketplace for furniture, art, fashion, and jewelry, we have a unique ecosystem of sellers and buyers. One important reality we run into as a team is that we are not frequent users of our own product. It is thus all the more important that we listen carefully to our users who are not only shopping on 1stdibs but using it as a tool to do their jobs. Some of these jobs are quite literal. However, as the team’s UX Researcher, I work across buyer and seller product tracks to learn about all the different jobs our users need to do, including the more subtle ones.
Instead of creating user personas around more traditional demographics, Clayton Christensen’s theory of Jobs to be Done to encourages companies to understand the jobs users need to do — that is, what users are trying to accomplish or create. In turn, companies should build products that users want to hire to do these jobs. For example, I hired the New York Times podcast this morning to help me block out the 20 minutes of being squashed between winter coats during by subway commute. I hired Third Rail Coffee to help me tackle my to-do list. One of the first research projects I took on at 1stdibs was to map out the experience of interior designers shopping on 1stdibs to better understand what jobs they need to do throughout a client project, how they do these jobs, and how we can improve our product in order to get hired
Packaging these Jobs into a User Journey Map: 3 Tips
User researchers must be exceptional listeners. During each user interview, we make a million micro-decisions about which threads in the conversation to push on and which threads to let go. But for research to have an impact, we must be even better storytellers. In the early stages of learning about your users, a user journey map is an effective tool for delivering these learnings back to your team. A user journey map breaks down a user experience into discrete, sequential steps. At 1stdibs, we then tie these steps to the jobs users need to do, how they feel at each step, and how they are interacting with our product. Based on my experience of creating user journey maps for both buyers and sellers, here are 3 tips for getting started:
- To start creating your user journey map, dive in with a set of 10 or so user interviews and build on it from there. I started by conducting in-depth, structured interviews with 9 interior designers who’d made a recent purchase on 1stdibs to understand their experiences from end to end. Sorting through the hours of interview tape and listening to how designers build relationships with their clients, search for pieces, and carefully vet pieces to understand the ins and out and guard against any surprises on install day, I started laying out the steps in an easily sharable slide deck, highlighting the “aha” moments and points of friction.
- How do you know when the map is done? Couldn’t you keep learning about your users forever? Know that your map is going to grow and evolve over time and that’s a good thing. Since laying out the initial research learnings, we’ve learned a lot both from our users directly as well as from the knowledge of our buyer-facing internal teams. Over the past year, we’ve relabeled, edited, and extended the map to the left and right.
- Illustrate your journey map and and put it up on the wall. I will be candid, I initially underestimated the impact of this step. Product cycles move fast at 1stdibs and each project we take on means five others we don’t. However, I have witnessed firsthand the power of adding illustrations to the map and physically putting the map up on the wall. It’s helped us keep our users top of mind and has made the research easier to share across the team— we can bring it with us to meetings and huddle around it when we’re kicking off or working through the details of a project.
Using Journey Maps to Shape Product Strategy at 1stdibs
Finally, a few specifics about the jobs interior designers need to do and how these learnings have helped shape product strategy and design at 1stdibs.
Sourcing (Finding Pieces)
Once interior designers have identified a style and aesthetic with a client, they begin searching the world (quite literally, as more inventory moves online) for options. During this phase, designers are trying to balance two often-conflicting needs: on one hand, they need to see as many options as possible so as not to miss out on that incredible find. On the other hand, they need to work within a set of constraints including deadlines, budgets, and the physical dimensions of the space. Hunting through the incredible collection of inventory on 1stdibs can quickly turn from inspiring to overwhelming.
Offering designers the right search filters is critical. As we expand our selection of made to order inventory on 1stdibs, designers on tight deadlines need to be able to easily filter down to just the pieces that are in stock. With this need in mind, we recently launched an “available now” filter. We have also build out an entire team of sourcing specialists, specifically dedicated to assisting interior design and architecture firms scour 1stdibs for options or connect with a maker to design a custom piece if the perfect one does not already exist.
Vetting (Narrowing Options)
In order to narrow a pool of options down to a curated handful they feel confident presenting to clients, interior designers put pieces through a rigorous vetting process. They need to know details including the trade price (an industry-standard discount), the condition for vintage and antique pieces, and what a piece will really look and feel like when it’s in the room. They are examining the hues and tones of the color. The weave of the fabric. How much space the item will take up in the room. Vetting an item entirely online can feel risky and uncomfortable, thus it is critical we provide designers with as much information as we can upfront, with easy pathways to fill in information gaps.
High-quality photos of pieces are instrumental to this vetting process. Designers are looking for photos that capture a variety of angles and details; up-close shots of the fabrics, detailed shots of scratches or flaws on antique and vintage pieces, shots in a room to understand size and scale. We encourage sellers to include a variety of photos upfront, and when we created an additional pathway for buyers (all buyers, not limited to interior designers) to contact sellers for more photos within the photo carousel, we saw > 10% lift in contacts.
Purchasing
To give an example of how our understanding of the needs of our users has evolved, we now think more holistically about how to meet the needs of design firms and the multiple roles that firms encompass. This is important because at many firms, interior designers are responsible for sourcing and vetting but then need to hand off items to someone else at the firm (or in some cases, a third-party) to purchase and manage the last-mile logistics. This past year, we learned that our product was creating quite a bit of friction for firms at this particular step. When an interior designer email went to hand off the piece to be purchased, any custom purchase details (for example, a discount or shipping quote), did not travel along with the piece. This friction not only created a confusing user experience but actively created hoops for design firms to jump through in order to purchase on the 1stdibs platform.
A problem of this size and complexity is a perfect candidate for a design sprint. Over the course of 5 intense days, my colleague Thalith from Product Design led a cross-functional 1stdibs team through brainstorming, sketching, prototyping, and testing solutions (more on that process here). Post-sprint, I put more detailed prototypes through a round of usability testing with both interior designers and the members of the design firms doing the purchasing, and this fall we launched a first version of the “transfer” tool. This tool allows one member of a firm to seamlessly send an item along with all the bespoke purchasing details to another person for purchase.
New Year, New Walls to Cover
At the end of last year, we laid a fresh piece of butcher paper on the table and updated the map with the products and services we’d launched in 2017. We then led a workshop with internal team members to take an updated pulse on pain points. We’ve made a lot of progress — we were relieved to hear different pain point bubbling to the top compared to this time last year. But there is also no shortage of hard work ahead. Fortunately there is also no shortage of wall space!
Drop us a Note
We’re always happy to chat about user research and process at 1stdibs and love learning from our colleagues. How does user research help you solve complex product problems? Drop me a note at kaley@1stdibs.com.
