Running wild with ideas
How to maximize customer insight using wildcards
A vital part of good product design is speaking to real customers to understand what they need from your website or app. At Waitrose we’re lucky to have access to a range of tools that we can use to get insights from our customers. Since the start of the pandemic, our customer research has gone almost fully online and we’ve been using tools such as UserTesting and Optimal Workshop to set tasks for our user research panel, which they complete in their own time.
Our latest research has been determining which features customers would want on the home screen of the Waitrose app. To find out their priorities we carried out a card sort where participants were instructed to put each card that contained the name of a feature into one of several columns. The columns were labelled from ‘I need this on the home screen’ to ‘I don’t want this on the home screen’.
In addition to having cards with existing features we also included several wildcards that described features that we could build but don’t currently have in the app. We recorded participants doing this activity so we could hear their thoughts on the cards.
A wildcard could be reacted to in one of three ways:
“I LOVE that idea!”,
“Meh, I’m not bothered either way”,
or “I HATE that idea!”.
If lots of customers say they love the idea we’ll do some more research into the best way to create that idea in our app, including producing sketches or prototypes of the idea and testing these with customers. For features that get a “meh” reaction we might do some more research, particularly if we’re confident that it’s a good idea and if we think we could get a better reaction from customers if they see it in practice.
It’s actually really valuable to get a strong “I HATE that” reaction. As an app designer you learn not to be precious about your ideas and not to take feedback personally! Such a reaction is a good signpost that shows the direction you shouldn’t be taking.
One of our wildcards was an idea we had that we could show Waitrose Stories like you see at the top of the screen on Instagram (and Twitter for a brief time). We thought this could be a neat way of displaying Waitrose content like recipes and new products. This kind of frequently refreshed content could encourage users to open the app more regularly too.
Here are some of the comments that users made when they saw our idea for ‘Stories (like on Instagram)’:
Non-Waitrose app shopper, aged 47, male: Stories like on Instagram. Crikey, don’t want that sort of stuff. I’m trying to do a shop, I’m not coming there to read other people’s stories. It’s food shopping, it’s not a film I’m going to watch. I don’t want it to be like social media.
Waitrose in store customer, aged 48, male: Stories like on Instagram… I think… boring. Don’t want that.
Waitrose in store customer, aged 37, female: Stories like on Instagram? No! I don’t need that while I shop!
Waitrose in store customer, aged 27, female: Stories like on Instagram… No, probably don’t want that on there. That seems a bit excessive.
Waitrose in store customer, aged 31, male: I don’t want that on the home screen. I don’t want Stories like on Instagram. It seems a bit pointless.
Waitrose in store customer, aged 25, male: Stories like on Instagram — definitely not on the home screen. I don’t know why that would be appropriate to have on the Waitrose app. Seems ridiculous for Waitrose to have Stories.
Waitrose app customer, aged 33, male: Stories like on Instagram? [scoffs] No! No, no, no, no, no, no, no. A million times no.
I wasn’t expecting to get such a strong reaction to this suggested feature. I thought participants might say things like “I guess you could have that”. Instead, we found almost all participants in the card sorting activity reacted extremely negatively to the idea.
Even though the results of this wildcard test were surprising, it was valuable to find this out at such an early stage. It is the kind of feature that could sound attractive to our colleagues: a great opportunity to showcase our high quality content in a new and exciting way. No other supermarkets have anything like it in their apps!
If we had spent time designing a prototype or, much worse, got our developers to start coding this new feature, we would have wasted a lot of time and money on something that our users do not want. It turns out there’s a reason why no other supermarkets have anything like it!
Follow us on Medium for updates on what our UX Research team has been up to and what new insights we’ve gained from Waitrose customers.
