Insights from Research & Working Remotely as a Team

From our last post, we left off saying we would continue conducting tabling research, as well as reaching out to forums. In sprint 4, we have accomplished this and then some. In the following article, we tell you about our Customer Affinity Diagram, our Customer Insights, Survey Data, Graphs, & Analysis, Conceptual Prototypes, how we are dealing with COVID-19 and working remote, Storyboarding, and lastly our next steps with the project.

Affinity Diagramming Session

After finishing our sprint 3 customer research, our team jumped into sprint 4 by synthesizing all of our Guerrilla and Booth research we conducted in February into an Affinity Diagramming Workshop. We ended up with over 1000 white notes to parse through, generating over 100 “I” statements, and leading to invaluable insights for use in making design decisions.

The workshop lasted for 10 hours, including a dinner break. We recorded a time-lapse of our affinity process, where you can see how much group discussion and change was made throughout the workshop. It was one of the most exhausting tasks we have completed as a team, but we came out excited by our work and accomplishment. We all signed the affinity diagram, solidifying our name in the contribution and effort we each made in the process.

Customer Insights

Based on our research we were able to synthesize some very profound insights into customer behavior. One thing we have to be careful when reflecting on these insights is that this information is self-reported. What user’s convey about themselves in interviews, does not always accurately reflect how they act in the real world.

Our insight fell under the following categories: the meaning of saving money, the value of CLO’s, how consumers view deals, how to retain users, feelings on privacy and security, personalization, effort, and education.

Saving money meant different things to different people:

1. Not spending money
2. Getting deals on planned purchases
3. Getting deals on unplanned purchases
4. Making money through stocks, investments, etc…

Banks can offer more value to its target audience by associating debit cards with rewards

• People don’t choose PNC because of its CLO program
• However, people thought banks providing CLOs was an added benefit
• They feel more secure and safe with banks providing offers
• After seeing the PNC app, people said they may start using it & appreciated that PNC had this program

Deals can be viewed as a way to manipulate consumer spending rather than saving money

• People ignore CLOs on PNC because they look like they’re trying to sell them something
• People don’t make decisions based on cashback offers or coupons/ deals

Immediate and significant value must be shown to users in order to utilize CLO apps

• People think it takes too much time to see big savings from apps because of small cashback offers
• People don’t see any value from cashback apps

Offers need to be personalized in order for people to take advantage of them People want cashback offers that fit their lifestyles more

• People want cashback offers that are more personalized

However, security and privacy are important concerns for users when adopting new tech

• People don’t trust some companies because they’re unsure of what they do with their information
• People need to do thorough research to figure out if an app is trustworthy
• Some have had bad experiences about financial information being leaked

If value created exceeds effort spent, then people will use CLOs more.

• People don’t want to spend much time in order to get cashback
• People evaluate the value of cashback offers based on how much time they spent to find the offers

But first, education about CLO processes is crucial to get people to adopt it

• Most people have never heard of CLOs
• After seeing the apps, they said they would use it
• But there is still confusion about the process of how offers works

Survey Data, Graphs, & Analysis

To collect more quantitative data and specifically target consumers who were heavily invested into proactively saving money we developed a survey to post in online forums. We used google forms to create the survey with five different sections: Demographic/General, CLO App Users, Non-CLO App Users, Bank CLO’s, and forms of payment. To entice participants we offered the chance to win a $25 gift card. We posted our survey in forums across reddit and facebook, however, we struggled often with being allowed to post our survey in certain forums, as it often fell under the spam category.

Ultimately we were able to get 35 responses and from these we were able to generate some interesting statistics and insights. The insights we generated were as follows:

The biggest way that people save money is ‘sticking to budget’

• Apps that people use to save money are budgeting apps like Mint, Ynab, and other budgeting apps
• Some participants were skeptical of cashback apps/ thinks it takes too much time

Ibotta is the most favored app

• It is not only the most used but also the most well known.

Demographics of people who use cashback

• Income level is not necessarily a determining factor when it comes to using cashback programs.
• Household size is normally more the one person for people who use it

Another interesting insight is that out of the 22 responders who used PNC, only seven(about 1/3 were aware of of the PNC offers), and out of those seven only four actually used them.

Conceptual Prototypes

At this point we knew our next step was to start acting on the information we had gathered on merchants and consumers and to start ideating. Based on what we learned we wrote down some CLO centric ideas for both merchants and consumers. We put these on post notes on a poster that had one half dedicated to merchant ideas and the other to consumer ideas.

We analyzed these and came up with more concrete ideas for the conceptual prototypes. The ideas for consumers were a wallet with built in cash back offers and a tool to better customize the deals consumers saw. For merchants our two ideas were a customizable dashboard and a flow for merchants to customize the cashback offered at their store.

We then hand drew low fidelity versions of these of these ideas. As a team we reviewed them and critiqued them before mocking up medium fidelity versions in Figma. We initially were planning to test these but after meeting with our numo liaison we decided to do some more ideating on ideas that were less CLO focused.

Spring Break and COVID-19

We began the ideating and low fidelity versions of our conceptual prototypes before spring break and continued the high fidelity individually during the break. In the midst of this COVID-19 was escalated to a pandemic. Our university made the inevitable decision to teach all classes remotely.

This meant a huge change for us. Not only were our classes affected but so was our capstone. As designers and researchers a large part of our work in normally done in person. We definitely felt (and still feel) nervous about removing the physical in-person aspect that dominated a lot of the work and discussion we did. We had many questions: “how will we conduct research remotely,” “will we be able to get insightful takeaways from interviews that are not in person,” “will we have issues contacting and conducting remote research with merchants, especially in trying times like these?” We still don’t know the answers to these questions, but we are figuring these out as we go, through trial and hopefully minimal error.

As for our group meetings, we are figuring out how to supplement online interactions with different tools, to create the best environment for us to communicate and collaborate. This is still a work in progress, but our university has given us access to several online tools that we are excited to test.

Crazy 8’s Exercise

After our initial meeting on Zoom, our team decided it would be best if we each came up with ideas using the Crazy 8’s method of ideation. If you are unfamiliar, this is where each team member creates 8 different ideas in just 8 minutes. It’s meant to be chaotic, and get us out of the mindset of making the “perfect” idea. Below is an image of each of the ideas we had come up with. You might see that there are both Customer ideas

After the 8 minutes were up, we each had 6 votes (3 for customer-facing ideas, and 3 for merchant -facing ideas) to distribute to our favorite ideas. The red stars indicate which ideas we would generate storyboards for.

Storyboards

The team assessed each idea generated in the Crazy 8’s exercise and assigned storyboard creation to each team member. The idea behind storyboarding is to try and assess the need a user might have, as well as the contextual limitations of the need. A storyboard generally follows the pattern of 4 panels: 1. Contextualize the user 2. Introduce the user’s problem 3. Show the solution to that problem 4. Show the resolution and outcome from the solution.

We created several storyboards to test with regular, everyday shoppers, as well as with business owners. In the weeks to come, we hope to validate our insights from the Affinity Diagramming workshop by way of showing our storyboards. The method which we will use to show our storyboards is called speed-dating. This is where a team member shows the full battery of storyboards in a rapid-fire like manner to an interviewee (in our case it’s either a customer or business owner). The interviewee then has the chance to explain their feeling about the idea, as well as talk about whether or not it solves the need we propose to them.

Next Steps

The next steps for our team include maintaining communication over zoom, interviewing both customers and business owners, and starting to think about prototype ideas which encapsulate our findings from the interviews.

While we are set back by the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic, our team is treating it like a slingshot aiming to shoot us forward into the future of research, design, and possibly work as a whole. We are being given the tools necessary to succeed in a remote space, which is a very possible future context we will all have to work in. Our team’s outlook on the situation remains positive, and we hope to bring you a more concrete prototype idea in our next post!