PrestaShop Lab: How did we create our user club to facilitate co-creation?

TL;DR

User research is essential, but recruiting participants for studies can be difficult. To solve this issue, we created the “PrestaShop Lab”, a user club to promote co-creation. Almost a year after the launch here’s what we have learned:

• It’s important to streamline the process to avoid over-soliciting users by email: that’s where the CRM team comes in!
• The value proposition should be clear to PrestaShop Lab participants. We organized welcome calls with new community members to better understand what motivated them to participate.
• Start small: it’s better to create a community with a few motivated members than with 1,000 people who are not engaged.
• To keep our community engaged, we need to renew ourselves: offer interesting content regularly, and vary our communication channels: here are the top challenges we expect to face in 2024!

There are already many articles online about user research: objectives, methods, benefits, deliverables…

At PrestaShop, we’re already convinced. To design a good product, we need to understand the people who use it. What are their needs and expectations? More than understanding them, we believe they have a real role to play in designing our products.

However, there’s one essential ingredient in user research: users, of course! And recruiting participants is not that easy.

That’s why we launched the PrestaShop Lab project in May 2022. Our goal was to create a community of users and invite them to co-create products with us.

How did the project start?

The idea wasn’t new. We already had a user base, called “User Club”. This was a list of contacts, of all nationalities, who had agreed to be contacted to take part in interviews or user tests. Unfortunately, this database wasn’t used by the Product teams, the club wasn’t animated, and the members weren’t engaged.

Our first step was to take stock of the situation and understand why this first attempt at a user club hadn’t worked. To do this, we were assisted by “Design Shot”, a design agency. UX Researcher Lisa Misiasze and I interviewed around 20 PrestaShop employees, across all teams, to better understand their research needs, difficulties, and processes.

These interviews highlighted several issues:

• There was no clear process for conducting user research. The teams didn’t use the User Club to recruit participants for their studies. Instead, they used their own databases and tools to contact users.
• PrestaShop squads didn’t always share the results of their studies with the rest of the Product team which led to knowledge loss.
• As for users, they were over-solicited by e-mail, and the response rate was low. The value proposition wasn’t clear to them.

Streamline the process

Our first challenge was to streamline the research process and harmonize the tools used for research. Indeed, each squad had its own method for inviting users to a study. It wasn’t always effective and it had a negative impact on the user experience, as users were receiving too many e-mails.

HubSpot soon appeared to be the ideal solution… at least for the Sales teams, who had already been using it for several years. Centralizing data and facilitating contact management: isn’t that what a CRM is all about? However, Product team members were less familiar with the tool and found it too complex to use. That’s why we worked closely with the CRM team throughout the project to raise awareness and train teams to use HubSpot.

The CRM team was also invaluable in creating the brand-new PrestaShop Lab workflow on HubSpot: creating HubSpot Meeting links, setting up a registration form, creating a list of contacts, etc. This work is still in progress. The aim is to automate as many tasks as possible to increase efficiency.

To avoid drowning users in e-mails, we have also decided to group all our studies in a single newsletter. It is sent out twice a month and it allows PrestaShop Lab members to check our studies. If they are interested in a study, they can book a meeting in just one click, thanks to a HubSpot Meeting link.

As for note-taking, data storage, and analysis, we’ve decided to bring everything together in a “research repository” on Dovetail. I won’t tell you more for now (I wouldn’t want to spoil a future article… 🤫)

Launch the PrestaShop Lab

Many people use PrestaShop: merchants who sell their products online, but also agencies, freelancers, partners, and more. Of course, the opinions of all our users are important, and we hope we’ll be able to invite different profiles to join the PrestaShop Lab.

At first, we decided to focus on merchants only. We also chose to contact French-speaking people only. Indeed, conducting interviews in other languages requires additional resources and a more complex organization that we’re not yet ready to put in place. In the meantime, we still take into account feedback from our international users through our Voice of the Customer program. We are also attentive to the local specificities of each market thanks to the Product Intelligence team’s work.

We took advantage of the summer of 2022 to organize the launch of the PrestaShop Lab. We prepared several communication tools:

• A page on prestashop.com to present the program
• An email campaign aimed at French-speaking merchants (9 e-mails addressed to different targets: new and more experienced merchants, former User Club members, etc.).
• Invitation cards for our physical events

The first invitations were sent out in September… that’s when the PrestaShop Lab was officially launched!

The first email invitations were well received by merchants, with very encouraging figures: an average 50% open rate and click-through rates of up to 25%. The PrestaShop Lab already had almost 75 members at the end of September, and over 100 by the end of 2022.

Start slow, grow big

Once we had 100 members in the PrestaShop Lab, we deliberately slowed down recruitment to take time to improve the new research process. The objective was not only to have a large community. We also had to keep our members engaged. For several weeks, Product team members organized interviews and tests with the new process. In the meantime, we continued to work on optimizing the HubSpot workflow and synchronizing the PrestaShop Lab with our research repository.

During the first 3 months, we also invited new members to a welcome call to find out what had motivated them to join the PrestaShop Lab and answer any questions they might have. Several key points emerged from these interviews:

• One of the main reasons why users joined the PrestaShop Lab was altruism. They wanted to “do their bit”. Not surprising, given PrestaShop’s open source DNA.
• Users wanted to meet the PrestaShop teams. They were also interested in meeting other users, who share the same challenges as they do.
• Of course, there was also a lot of curiosity. A brand-new co-creation program and beta tests… they were up for it!
• A few concerns remained: “How long does it last?”, “Do we have to do the tests directly on our website?”, “Will you share the results of the studies?”, and so on. These questions helped us adapt our communications to reduce friction, and also to identify areas for improvement.

Once the process had been tested and improved, we decided to broaden the base by inviting agencies and freelancers to join the PrestaShop Lab. By April, the PrestaShop Lab had 150 members.

We didn’t stop there. We continued to send out email invitations. A recruitment campaign was also launched on social networks. Today, 215 members are taking part in the co-creation of PrestaShop products and services.

What’s next?

The PrestaShop Lab adventure is just beginning. We still have a long way to go. Now that the initial excitement has faded, recruitment has become more difficult, and the number of study participants is declining. But thanks to feedback from users and members of the PrestaShop team, we have many ideas to boost engagement and continue to grow the community. The action plan for next year is already in the pipeline: opening the PrestaShop Lab internationally, using new communication channels, and offering new awards… There are still plenty of challenges ahead!