What do our users think about birthdays?

My name is Lisa Kennedy, and I recently completed my first graduate rotation in the User Research team.

In this blog post I am reflecting on my experience of conducting a desirability study to understand users’ perceptions of an organisation celebrating an anniversary.

Plusnet is celebrating its 25th anniversary this year (2022).

We wanted to find out how customers would perceive celebrating this milestone in response to potentially exploring the use of anniversary content across our website through marketing content.

Would there be positive, negative or neutral connotations in response to the proposed anniversary messaging and the designs (such as banners and badges)?

What better than a round of user research to learn more? Throughout this research process I worked closely with my squad — which included the Product Owner, two Product Designers and a Content Designer. I also reached out to the experienced User Research team at BT who provided invaluable guidance about some initial methods I considered.

First steps — how did I tackle this research activity?

Initially, I considered the research methods I was currently using — moderated and unmoderated discovery studies — would be appropriate for this research request.

Since usability studies focused more on observing users’ behaviours, I realised this method would not help me understand what people thought about the proposed anniversary content — the true ‘why’ behind those behaviours.

So, I reached out to the User Research team at BT to soundboard the strengths and drawbacks of an attitudinal approach instead.

The attitudinal research methods I considered were card sorting and a desirability study.

• Card sorting would be a useful research method to work out the organisation of information on a website for example.
• A desirability study enables users to select words to describe the aesthetics of a webpage or website. Also, this study could be embedded within a remote usability setting. This was the type of method I was looking for.

Next– once I’d identified and selected the desirability study as the appropriate method, how did I adapt this to suit the research objectives?

The desirability study — also known as the Microsoft desirability Toolkit or Microsoft Reaction Card Method — allows researchers to create a list of words, or product reaction cards, that users then select to describe the content in question.

I adapted the product reaction cards from the original study to relate more to the study goals — specifically to measure the aesthetics, perception and connotations of the anniversary content.

In total I suggested the following words that covered positive, negative and neutral connotations: Impressive, ordinary, futuristic, old, meaningful, irrelevant, trustworthy, not valuable, relevant, undesirable, inspiring, and dated.

While this methodology controlled the vocabulary users could select that aided the data analysis process, I was interested in learning what other words and sentences users associated with this anniversary content.

The process — what insights did we gain from this research study?

This round of research involved 15 users in total. Two out of the three prototypes we tested resulted in most users associating positive connotations with the anniversary content.

Most users found it easy to engage with the anniversary content on the third prototype that was preferred by 11 out of 15 users.

However, on the other two prototypes, some users found the anniversary content on hidden on the page, with them needing to scroll through the page to find the content.

Some users also expected more obvious celebratory content, including ‘happy birthday’ text and using more recognisable visual cues like balloons to clearly signal this anniversary.

This feedback was linked to 12 out of 15 users stating our positive connotations words, such as trustworthy, and when generally talking about an organisation or brand celebrating an anniversary.

During the analysis process, I further split the users into two user groups — Plusnet customers and non-Plusnet customers — to better understand how the word selection and attitudes differed across the user groups. You can see a sample of this from the first prototype I tested below.

Sharing knowledge and lessons learnt — how did the findings of this research inform ideas for changes to the design and content?

Before starting the analysis process, I facilitated a collaborative analysis session with my squad to discuss the most important insights customer pain points, and to identify user needs.

Insights: we learnt that celebrating a 25th anniversary was mainly a positive milestone. We also gained a deeper understanding of Plusnet’s brand perception from both existing customers and non-customers.

Pain points: users raised frustrations around expectations of celebratory anniversary content versus the designs users were shown.

This provided an opportunity for us to consider how we could use more engaging content to celebrate this anniversary, drawing the crossover areas between the mainly positive connotations users associated with celebratory anniversary content and the Plusnet brand. I delivered a playback of this research to colleagues outside of digital such as marketing, to share these ideas that could influence future designs for anniversary content to embody a more visible, recognisable celebration that was meaningful for users to engage with Plusnet products during this celebratory moment.

We have the rest of the year to bring these ideas into fruition so watch this space…