Rated People is UK’s leading online marketplace matching homeowners with trusted tradespeople. The rapid, iterative insights I produced drove strategic product decisions forward and led to omni-channel UX improvement.
Client vertical: Online marketplace
Projects: 2 native apps (tradespeople and homeowners), responsive website
Team: Myself, with the support of data, product and marketing teams
What I did: Generative research
Uncovering the underlying user needs, understanding users and defining the problem for proposition development. Examples on such projects answered questions such as:
- How homeowners budget and research to make big purchases
- How tradespeople manage their job leads and workflow
- Ideal leads – what makes job leads attractive to tradespeople
- New RAL RAC – what is the tradesperson experience for the current ‘refund’ policy for leads purchased
Turning research insight into artefacts to communicate what we’ve learned about users. Examples include:
- Big purchases experience map
- Insight based user profiles
I evaluated/benchmarked existing product for performance and usability issues. I conducted prototype testing to uncover first impressions, blockers and issues that could be fixed. Examples of such projects looked at the following areas of the website and app:
- Homepage/job form – multiple iterations
- Lead tracker – in prototype and beta stages
Building a user research library MVP for future teams
To manage the rapidly growing archive of research I was creating, I needed to find a way to support sharing and collaboration of insights across multiple projects – and not just share these with the product team, but with anyone in the company who was interested (e.g. marketing and sales).
After researching solutions in the market, I introduced knowledge management MVP in the form of Aurelius Labs, a simple tool that allows you to upload, tag and group insight collections together.
Other problems I built business cases to hire tools to solve
- how might we access non-customers for research?
- how might we find ways to analyse customer product feedback from various sources in one place (e.g. appstore, email, calls, social media) more easily?
- how might we reduce the amount of app inboxes and unstructured data we get from them?
Governance and frameworks
I co-created brief templates for new research requests. The creates a shared, clear understanding of what we’re trying to achieve, what the success criteria are and avoids scope creep.
I documented the full research cycle in terms of stages, outputs and wrote how-to guides on the common practices we used. This means future researchers have a framework to refer to and adjust. This also helps educate stakeholders, managing expectations on turnaround times, limitations and ask for a dedicated research budget
Advocating research as a company sport
My proudest achievement is making research known as an activity anyone in the company can take up and use to ask/find answers to questions about users.
- Making allies with the customer service team (Swindon call centre), I was the first to conduct several customer journey mapping and design thinking workshops. The insights were used to inform major strategic proposition developments of the marketplace
- I created a research rota with regular callouts — for staff to participate in research as observers, note takers, guerrilla testers and help with recruitment