I was involved in organising and conducting interviews with users
We then reviewed that data using thematic analysis and sentitment analysis
We used this data to further deepen our knowledge of our users to use in future designs
As part of the volunteer UX team at Orcasound, a site and application that allows users to listen to live audio recordings of orca whales in the seas around Seattle, Washington, we work alongside developers and marine biologists to create a worthwhile user experience.
My main role at Orcasound was to advance previous research that had been carried out, to get a clearer overview of our users. Up to now all design decisions had made been based off of a handful of interviews. This had lead to some negative feedback based on usability and ease of use of the Orcasound Listening Application.
3 Personas had already been created, but further interviews and analysis was needed to understand what our users expected from the Listening Application and this could be used to hand over to the design team to improve the overall user experience.
My main tasks were:
I learnt a lot on this project. It allowed me to hone my skills in Research methods and processes while also having the opportunity to work in a team and implement common methods. I documented all my research and put it together in a document for the team to access.
First point of call was to transcript each of the interviews which had been conducted. As a group, we each took on one interview to transcript.
After which, I created some tag groups based off common features throughout the interviews. These were:
These tag groups where our main groups, which then between us we created sub-tags which could fit within these tag boundaries. This allowed each of us to get an overall picture of our interviewees.
The next step was to gather those tags together into some common threads or themes, to bring it all together.
We created a few sentences under each tag category to summarise that user and then create a overall summary at the bottom to combine all of that data into something meaningful and useful moving forward.
Once each of us at done this for our assigned interviews, we moved to the next step of grouping common themes amongst each of the interviews, to start creating some common persona traits, which would help us moving forward in creating potential sub-personas, or adding to the persona's Orcasound already had.
After analysing the interview data to understand the user’s sentiments and narrow down common themes, we moved onto creating a mock up of the current user journey, based off of the interviews.
This would allow us to further improve the service and product as a whole, helping us to highlight when pain points enter the user journey and when constraints kick in. This will help us on what part of the product we can focus on in future design ideation. Below is the current user journey mock up based of an interviewee.
Analysing this, we can see the overall user sentiment drops off in the middle of the user’s journey, as this is when the major constraints kick in (time constraints, financial constraints etc) then pick up towards the end, as the user reaches his/her goal.
We can also see where our product (Orcasound Hydrophones) could come into the user’s journey and where we can focus on making sure the user is aware of our product and service.
The creation of this journey for each of the interviews, will help us to find common user journey’s from amongst all of the interviews and this will help us in moving forward in creating new personas/updating existing personas.
Finally, we moved on to spectrum analysis. Here, we can combine findings from the user journey and thematic tagging, to start grouping together each interviewee to find common threads and common traits amongst the users. This can help us in creating new personas or sub-personas.
In spectrum analysis, you can find common groupings of responses. If we find common answers from a number of interviewees (circled on the spectrum), this can be classed as common behavioural pattern by our users and then we can add it to our user persona.
As you can see above, after finding some common behaviours, a common type of user or persona became clear.
This is what we understood:
- The user rarely tends to attend Orca whale watches but have a high interest in watching them, so constraints such as finance or lack of direction can hinder ability to attend watches. However tend to regularly contribute financially to the conservation efforts. Also the user is hit and miss in listening the the hydrophones (live whale recordings).
These insights can gave us valuable insights moving forward in design decisions towards the Orcasound listening app and website.
Using the Spectrum analysis helped us to identify a common user or persona type, which would be added to our persona list, to be able to further consider our users in design decisions throughout the Orcasound platform. The user journey helped us to understand how a typical user of Orcasound would go about getting involved in whale conservation and therefore how likely they would be to use the Orcasound listening app and at what point they would encounter issues.
Here is the Persona we created:
Now using the research collected and analysed, I moved onto how this research could be translated into potential opportunities and insights for the product.
Notable take aways about users were:
These were great insights into helping us discuss potential changes to the application. One would be to stimulate more active engagement in whale conservation.
Below is the current listening page:
However, here taking into account the potential to get the users more invested in the orca whale conservation, this landing page could spark this interest even further. Improvements I put together in a report:
These different options were to be discussed with the research and design team after I left the project. Our aim was to make sure the user was more invested in the conservation efforts and this would lead to the user using Orcasound more regularly.
One challenge I faced was leading the team. This was the first time I'd been given an assignment to build and lead a team of researchers. This was a task that I was willing to take on and willing to execute but it was a challenge to monitor and assign work to all researchers. Sometimes researchers would quickly finish their task and others may take longer and need more supervision. One way I confronted this challenge was by pairing quicker researchers with more inexperienced ones, so they could assist each other and also the inexperienced researcher would learn how to tackle a task.
Performing this persona creation project really gave me valuable insights into the mind of our users. Being able to deeply analyse these interviews, notice common threads and themes to our users pain points, really helped us in adding to our current user personas.
What I would do differently next time, is to maybe do the spectrum analysis earlier on in the research process. This way we would understand the types of users we had, before doing further analysis on them. This might help me to notice more persona specific pain points.
After this research was carried out, the design team were better able to understand the users they were building for. They made sure there were more tool tips for example to help explain the usefulness of certain features in the app, especially ones that alerted the user to where they could apply for conservation efforts or where they could go to whale watches.