Week 62 — The Research for Our Next Big Feature

Product

While the tech team is hard at work smashing bugs, the rest of DayOne have buckled down to preparation for the challenges of 2022. For starters, what would be the next big feature DayOne will work on?

A lot of research has been conducted to help us answer that question. We started off with a series of user interviews with service sector staff. The user interviews provided the foundation for understanding what our users value at work, what motivates them, as well as what turns their mood upside down.

Thank you to each and every person who took time out of their busy schedule to speak with us!

With all those insights on hand, we were able to craft two personas that would guide all future design work!

Personas, while fictional, reflect real life user patterns, and help the team empathise with the target users we are designing for

“What are personas?”, you may ask. They are fictional characters based on hard facts gathered through research. They represent different user types, in our case, Motivated Molly represents the go-getter staff who strives to do their very best at everything they are tasked with, while Average Andy is your typical lackadaisical, go with the flow and stick to the status quo employee.

Motivated Molly and Average Andy help the team understand our target users behaviours, feelings, attitudes, motivations, and most important of all their needs.

We got our two personas to go on a similar journey to flesh out the distinct differences in their responses

As you can see from their respective journey maps, Molly and Andy respond fairly differently to the same stimulus, hence, when designing, we need to consider both ends of our user spectrum to avoid isolating any particular user group.

Next, we also made sure to engage our brands too to take a deep dive into the challenges they face. After all, they’ll be the ones deciding whether to be onboarded with DayOne, and their needs are equally important!

We caught up with five different businesses and spoke to them on the different aspects of running the business, ranging from operational challenges, to problems arising from staff engagement (or the lack thereof).

A lot of friction at the workplace is generated from administrative work, human resources challenges, and poor communication

While the businesses varied in size and business model, we nevertheless spotted common threads in the challenges that they faced. One of the problems that they share is the tedium of rostering and scheduling staff, as well as broken lines of communication.

In Part II of the research for our next big feature, we’ll share how the team came together to discuss the user and business insights, and how we eventually came to settle on which problem to tackle come 2022!

In the meantime, Merry Christmas and Happy Holidays! Wishing everyone all the happiness the holidays can hold!