How User Research Evolves as a Startup Grows

You most probably heard it many times before;
Start-ups move fast, try fast, fail and learn fast, develop fast…

To kick this story off, it’s all very true! And it has been exciting to experience how our User Research team and our way of working has evolved as the organization continued to grow in this pace.

Before getting started with how we evolved, let me share a question that inspired me in doing research at HappyFresh.

Before joining HappyFresh, I worked at a company where I was responsible for user experience within a particular product group. This product group itself already made it easy to understand who our (potential) users would be. At HappyFresh on the contrary, we sell groceries. Everybody needs groceries, right? So my question was “Who are our users?” “Is it everyone?”.

With this question in mind we continued to learn and grow, and improve our research to support our stakeholders better. Note that the answer to this question is not included in this article, only the way it inspired us.

Our User Research team kicked off early 2017. My colleague, Robert Ignatius, is one of the very first UX researchers who joined as an intern at the beginning of that year.

Let me share 3 ways in which our user research approach evolved throughout these past years:

1. We did more guerilla tests in the early days

In the early days before there was even an UX Researcher, the designers used to go to the lobby of our office building to do guerrilla tests. The team would show the app prototype to strangers to test the visibility of a certain features, or to understand their perception towards a page design. The team approached those who might be above 25 years old. Sometimes the team also asked new employees to try the prototype. At that stage, every insight that we got from user was better than nothing.

Nowadays, we are more advanced in recruiting. We have a big user base we can tap into, enabling us to interview users in their natural environment or invite them to our office. We can also segment our users based on demographics or shopping behavior and pick the users that best fit our objectives.

2. We do research with the user as our starting point

In the early days we used to ask users about our product, our app, but we talked less about who they are. When we invited people, we might only know their basic bio such as age and occupation, but not more than that.

We used to ask personal questions, but they would serve more as a warming-up tool instead of a tool to better understand the context to their answers.

Nowadays, we use the personal questions to better understand the users’ context, because we believe that everybody is different and understanding “why” they do what they do instead just knowing “what” they do is of key importance to improving our services and designs.

Subsequently these personal insights also enabled us to identify user segments — personas — that we use to explain different use cases to our stakeholders.

3. We have more space for Discovery Research

We also grew in terms of size, and since January 2019 we have 3 people in the User Research team. This, plus the learnings of the team, enabled us to focus more on discovery research as well.

Just recently, the team went to Malaysia and Thailand to do customer journey mapping. We conducted interviews and joined users shopping in their natural environment to understand better how they do their groceries. For Interviews, we tapped into our existing user base and for user shopping observation, we asked our colleagues if they know friends who suit our target audience for this particular study. We observed the way they shop, and asked questions to discover the reasons behind their behaviors, such as spontaneous buy, or why they visited the aisles that they visited.

—

User Research in early-stage startups will always have limitations in terms of budget and people. We might aim for quick wins and simpler approach at the beginning, but over time we need to start thinking long-term and aim for findings that could be a solid foundation for the future or our company. I’m proud to say that at HappyFresh our Product team keeps moving to a better direction (remember to check out our opportunities here!).