Incorporation & Business Filings Research
User Research, Open-coding, Affinity Diagram, Personas, Data
Overview
This is a 2-month initiative to understand who exactly are our current customers, what are their behaviors, pain points, wants and needs. Prior to this user research effort, there was little to no concept of user research within the Rocket Lawyer organization. This was my chance to share and introduce a proper, but manual user research process to the entire company.
Challenge
For business filings and incorporation, Rocket Lawyer aimed to introduce useful products for their current and future business owners who have ongoing legal/business needs. Before we dive into ideation of what features and experience we should design and build, we first need to understand who our current customers are, what they like and don’t like when using our product, as well as their goals and motivation.
My Role
I was the sole User Researcher in this initiative. I advocated and implemented a full design research process from scratch. This is the first thorough user research conducted at Rocket Lawyer. I also mentored my design team and showed them how this user research can vastly benefit and influence future design directions.
Solution
Identified 3 distinct personas within the Small-Medium Business (SMB) sector. Supporting these personas with business and financial data demonstrated clear focus on who we should target. Future Business, Marketing, and Design strategic decisions have been made based on this user research effort.
UX Goal
Our goal in this initiative is to dive into the customers’ business world and understand their day-to-day operations and challenges. We intended to explore the problem space first to figure out how Rocket Lawyer could provide more value to what they are already using.
Methodology
Since this is the first formal user research completed at Rocket Lawyer, the methodology was manual and the entire process took 2+ months to finish, as I was the only person conducting this research. This process has been since implemented at Rocket Lawyer for future projects:
Step 1: Calculate design research budget
Example: If your design team’s budget is $500 for a user research study, then you may want to plan around 8–10 participants with a $50 incentive per 1-hour interview session per person. That will give you a range of $400-$500.
Step 2: Create interview protocols
This is a very important step, especially if you were to have multiple team members in a user research study. The reason is because you would want to be consistent between team members AND participants when you’re asking the questions. By asking the same questions, you would be able to analyze and synthesize your feedback later.
Step #3: Identify what type of participants you’d like to interview
Example: You’d want to have an idea of who you want to target. Since incorporation are usually done by business owners, you can make some guesses on people who have incorporated once, people who may have done more than one incorporation, and people who have done 10+ incorporations (these are usually legal/accounting professionals who incorporate on behalf of their own clients).
Step 4: Screen, recruit, and schedule participants
Step 5: Interview participants and collecting feedback
Example: I interviewed my participants remotely, so I chose the following tools to facilitate this effort: Your internal Data Team and Survey Monkey (for recruiting and screening participants), Google Calendar (for scheduling), Google Hangout (for interviewing/video/audio chat), my Google Pixel (for recording the audio — make sure to ask for consent first before recording anything!), Google Doc/Sheet (for jotting down all the feedback).
Step 6: Thank participants and send incentives
Example: Please don’t forget this step! I thanked each participant for taking out their time to answer my many questions. I’m grateful for the 8 people that accepted my invite because the remaining 192 either did not respond or flaked out on me. So, I’ve personalized each email based on each of our conversation, and attached a $50 Amazon e-Gift card in the email. I made sure that they felt appreciated for their efforts.
Step 7: Synthesize feedback using Open-coding (Affinity Diagram)
Step 8: Create personas based on insights
Step 9: Connect personas with business data and metrics to drive strategic decisions
I will go more in-depth in the sections below for Steps 7–9. These are tools and approaches to reach the final goals which is to figure out your main audience to target.
Open-coding (Affinity Diagram) from Step 7
The concept of open-coding is pretty much to categorize all the common qualitative feedback you collected from your interviews into digestible insights and themes. The result of open-coding is called an Affinity Diagram.
The green notes are the overarching questions, the pink notes are the major themes, the blue ones are the common insights, and the yellow ones are the individual feedback/comments from the 8 participants I’ve interviewed.
I’ve found that the major themes have been centered around:
I come to Rocket Lawyer because I was overwhelmed, and lawyers cost too much for me.
I need Rocket Lawyer to walk me through all the legal/business stuff I need to do/know effortlessly.
I don’t know what to do to maintain my company, and I need alerts to tell me what to do…
With an abundance of details and insights gathered, I’ve created three distinct personas that pretty much represent majority of our business owners customers (see next section).
Personas from Step 8
The three distinct personas have unique characteristics; however, there are also some overlap in terms of pain points and needs:
Jennifer: She’s a first-time business owner and doesn’t understand most of the legal jargon, so she wants an easy step-by-step education to setup and maintain her business — Jennifer is our primary target audience.
Dylan: He has multiple businesses and want to grow each of his business. Even though he had experienced in the past, he still wanted recurring reminders and alerts so he can focus on what he loves to do, rather than the legal stuff — Dylan is our secondary target audience.
William: He is a tax/legal professional who incorporate for his clients. His needs, wants and pain points are much different than Jennifer and Dylan. His main goal is to expand his client base — William is our last target audience.
Business Data & Metrics from Step 9
After identifying the three personas for business filings, I’ve connected some revenue and user data to each of the personas (I’ve blocked out the actual numbers for confidential purposes).
Key Takeaway
This information is very useful because we know exactly who to target and how to strategically drive our product decisions going forward:
- Increase the conversion of acquired incorp customers (Jennifer & Dylan)
- Convert the 85% of non-incorp users who have a business to incorporate with us or perform additional business services with us.
- Increase the long-term revenue (LTR) of both the customers who have incorporated (Jennifer & Dylan) and the customers who have business-related assets on Rocket Lawyer (Non-Incorp users).
Some ideas and wireframes to achieve these product design goals are illustrated in the Incorporation & Business Filings Designs if you’d like to read further.
Next project: Incorporation & Business Filings Designs
