Don’t stop me now!

UX Research at Badi: 6 facts that corona hasn’t changed

Just like the rest of the world I would like this crisis to end rather today than tomorrow. But besides all the up and down in private and professional life, I’m a firm believer in positive thinking. That’s why I decided to draft my article around stability, hopes and the joy of being a researcher.

As a UX researcher at Badi I’m in the lucky position that I can do my job from home. Yes, the new situation is challenging, we’re still learning how to best work together in times of quarantine and are adjusting to the new circumstances, but there are also a lot of things that still remain the same:

1. No users, no future

More than 2M users worldwide have used Badi to find their flatmates and our community keeps growing every day. At Badi, we are truly grateful for the trust people have placed in us. We are aware that this trust and faith go hand in hand with the mission of making our product better for our community every single day.

Every day we get up full of motivation and passion to make Badi a little better than it was the day before. What motivates us to leave our bed and move over to a desk, a kitchen table, a sofa or wherever our work space might be at the moment, is the shared belief that we are building a product that improves people’s lives.

When I first started learning about Badi I got really excited about the mission of making flat sharing easier and more enjoyable than ever before. In a global world centring more and more around metropolitan areas with living space being a limited resource, I believe the future lies in sharing spaces and moving closer together.

2. In-depth Interviews: Understanding users’ needs is the basis of innovation

Delivering the best product for our community is our top priority. The only way to understand our users is to listen to them carefully and understand what the process of renting out a room or looking for a new place means for them. And it’s only after having understood their needs that we will be able to centrate our efforts on developing new product features or services, which are meaningful for them.

Qualitative research methods such as ethnography, observations, contextual interviews or diary studies are typically applied to get an holistic understanding of the users’ context, their behaviours, attitudes, needs and pain points all along the user journey.

I joined Badi in January this year, but I was lucky enough to have already met more than 20 users in their homes. Contextual interviews have helped me out a lot — and thus the rest of the Badi family — to feel what it means to share flats in Barcelona.

Due to the serious situation caused by the COVID-19 virus, we had to stop visiting users but it doesn’t mean that we stopped talking and learning from them. In the past 2 weeks of Spanish quarantine, I had long chats with more than 15 people about their experience sharing their homes, looking for a room to live or a new flatmate.

I’m truly impressed by how supportive our users are, how happy they are to help us improve our platform, even in times where many of them probably face personal insecurities and fears much bigger than this.

3. Usability Tests: User testing before implementation saves time & money

We all know that our users have different concerns than moving to a new apartment right now. But we hope — no, we’re convinced — that better times are waiting just around the corner. And we want to be prepared for that. So our product teams, and especially our UX writers and designers, are putting all their energy into drafting new features and improved flows with a clearer storytelling and a nicer look and feel.

To ensure that what they come up with will work for our users as they hope, we’re busy now testing prototypes remotely. Last week we tested a new flow for listers publishing their rooms to rent and detected 3 severe misunderstandings that needed a copy change and 2 usability issues where interaction models where not clear — imagine we would have developed our best guess right away!

Whenever COVID-19 allows us to move back into our offices, we’ll invite users to our lab again, a comfy little living room like space where users come to test our prototypes and share their feedback. Meanwhile, we show them the prototypes digitally and discuss in a video call. And by the way, this has plenty of benefits as well: While we would typically focus more on the local customers that having an easy time visiting us in the center of beautiful Barcelona, we’re now inviting customers from all around the globe equally.

4. Online Surveys: User feedback helps us navigate

Different research methodologies serve different needs. For some research questions an in-depth conversation is needed and others require larger samples. In normal times Badi would rely heavily on behavioural data, such as AB tests, click data and conversion analysis. One of the things I learnt during my psychology studies and never forgot is that “past behaviour is the best predictor of future behaviour”. But when the world is in an exceptionally new and different situation, we cannot even rely on statistical rules like this. The best we can do now is rely on various different sources and ask many people how they feel, how they react and adjust to the situation and what they foresee for their near and far future. Getting this input from as many users as possible will help us understand the situation better and base our decisions on more than just our own good feeling.

5. Collaboration: Everyone can contribute to good user research

User research is a team sport. Even during normal times I happily rely on the support from designers, product managers, content specialists and marketing experts to shape and conduct research activities with me. So it’s only logical to involve more colleagues now. In some parts of the Badi business workload is reducing, e.g. fewer customer support calls are coming in, so more colleagues can get involved in customer research. They are programming the surveys into typeform, analyse survey data, create presentations for that, help recruiting users, take notes during interview sessions, and much more. That’s a great opportunity for establishing a truly customer centric organisation!

6. Morning Routine: I want to look nice for our users

I live alone, I haven’t had any direct contact with human beings for more than 2 weeks now. I don’t leave the house, but still continue my morning routine. I have a shower, do my hair, put some make-up and dress up professionally (weeeeell, at least the part that’s going to be seen in a video call ;-)).

Are you flat sharing or renting out rooms? Would you be up for a chat? Contact me via research@badi.com.