How Design Thinking Helped Me Tackle Personalization
It’s early afternoon around 11:15 a.m. One of the users we’ve invited to RetailMeNot has just arrived a bit late to the office, with her cute-as-a-button toddler in tow. Let’s call her Alice. It’s obvious Alice is on a tight schedule and is juggling multiple responsibilities today, but I get the sense that like many moms this is a pretty typical day for her. She apologizes for being late and I wave it off and instead thank her profusely for coming in to chat with us. I find myself overwhelmed with gratitude that this woman has agreed to spare 30 minutes of her precious time to talk to me about our product and her shopping habits.
Despite her apologies for being late and having to bring her kid along, Alice’s interview was a perfect gateway into truly understanding our customer. As we peppered her with questions about her shopping behaviors, preferences and tools she deftly managed the toddler in her lap, alternating between answering our questions and keeping her kid calm and engaged.
On a deep level I began to understand how organized she needs to be to keep up with everything, and while using our product to save money is certainly important to Alice, I realize that it is just as important to create experiences that are easy, convenient and most importantly help Alice save time. We are only a few hours into our first Design Thinking Workshop and it is already paying off big time!
What is design thinking?
In its simplest form design thinking is just a framework for problem solving with more of a hands-on, user-centric emphasis in its approach. The idea being that building empathy with your users leads to having a better understanding of the core problems your product is trying to solve for them, which in turn leads to better products that users love.
I had been tasked with figuring out how to create engaging personalized experiences for our users. I was excited to get to work on something that had the potential to be so meaningful to our users, but I was also worried. I mean personalization is vague and can take many forms. I could spend months testing different user experiences and algorithms and have nothing of value to show at the end of it. Lucky for me I only had three weeks to research and test and validate a few concepts with users and build a roadmap to begin integrating more personalized experiences into the product.
A design thinking workshop seemed like the perfect way to quickly understand how we might leverage personalization to better serve our users. I gathered a cross-functional team that included folks from marketing, design, engineering, data science, operations and product and scheduled a two-day workshop focused on developing an effective personalization strategy.
Running the workshop
Day one was all about our users.
We started by interviewing six people. We took care to try and acquire a diverse group that adequately represented our client base. We included moms like Alice, but also single men and women and married couples. During the interviews one person focused on asking questions and guiding the conversation. The rest of the group took copious notes — taking care to document not just what each user said out loud, but also through body language, facial expressions and the emotional vocal inflections. We were looking for the cues that revealed areas of frustration or joy in the shopping process, every grunt, smile and frown gave us a wealth of knowledge. Focusing this intently on each we couldn’t help but to form an emotional connection with each person. As we began to empathize with our users, understanding their problems and frustrations became easier.
We finished day one by taking our notes and observations building lean personae, empathy maps and user journey maps. These artifacts set the stage for day two where we focused on framing our user problems, brainstorming and prioritizing ideas and then storyboarding and sketching out our top two concepts.
The payoff
At the end of the workshop, I found I had acquired a treasure trove of valuable information.
1. A deep understanding of how personalization impacts user perceptions and shopping behaviors.
2. A prioritized list of user problems that personalization could positively impact.
3. A prioritized list of ideas to test to solve those problems.
4. Completed storyboards and concepts for two of the most promising ideas.
Plus, my peers across the company were able to contribute to the process and come away with the same user insights.
I had spent one week planning and recruiting users for the workshop and two days running the actual workshop. I had a week and a half remaining and I had already nearly completed my objective. I used my remaining time to begin building my personalization roadmap and scoping some of the concepts we had developed.
Having a cross-functional team had an additional benefit I had not anticipated that really helped me move much faster through this process. Since I had included design, engineering and data science teams in my workshop we shared a common framework of understanding which allowed us to define feature requirements and acceptance criteria more thoroughly and much faster than anticipated. I felt like I had acquired product management superpowers after going through this process. I found the design-thinking approach to be a fast, efficient and rewarding way to develop product.
