Niagahoster’s Member Area Analysis Using Pareto Principle

Photo by Austin Distel on Unsplash

Member Area has been our main product for more than 3 years. We want to improve it but not only we have limited resource, we also do not really know which ideas should we prioritize first. The situation became worst, when I realize that we put a lot of assumptions in our ideas such as:

1. We assume that user is already familiar on how to use Member Area
2. We assume that user need Wordpress Management
3. We assume that our interface design good enough for user

And no one really put an effort to validate those assumptions.

Therefore, as an UX designer this issue concerned me because if I am a user, I won’t use Member Area for a long time. Instead of starting by assumption, I wanted to understand in depth what are users needs.

At first UX team–part of the product team– recommended to conduct a usability test first, but the idea wasn’t accepted because our stakeholders preferred a quantitative strategy– thought that we could not define priorities using the qualitative method.

We concluded that we must use a quantitative method but had no idea for the best approach. After digging for some literature, I found about Pareto Implementation in Affinity Map.

We started with this strategy. At first, we sent questioner to Member Area’s existing users, simply asked them 2 questions (The user should answer them in a short essay):

1. What do you like from Member Area?
2. What do you hate from Member Area?

Surprisingly, we gathered more than 1400 responses in a week! We got A LOT of information about our users and we needed to acquire the solution ASAP. To prevent much time for analysis, we only aimed at users’ problems. It took 3 days to scan the whole essays.

The warming up: We set 50 first responses into this affinity map before arranged all of them in the excel file

Then the UX team plotted them into an affinity map. Each group of problems was accumulated into a graph.

“Roughly 80% of the effects come from 20% of the causes.”

–Pareto principle

Based on the 80/20 rule of Pareto Principle, we defined problems that aligned to 80% of the total accumulation are our most priorities.

Topmost priorities are the problems that outspread before 80% point

If we look properly, the interface problem has the highest accumulation. Our Member Area design is lack of consistency because we have no design system yet. Most of the users said that our interface is too old and needs modernism. Even we got insights to give them an option for night mode.

Finally, we agreed to start everything from redesigning the Member Area. To make sure there won’t any issues in design consistency, we decided to create a new design system for Member Area.

But before the redesign process, we have to make sure we will create the best interface and experience for our users. So, we conducted a usability test to know better of user behaviors and needs in Member Area.

How do we run the test? Please wait for the next article! :D