Background
When I joined Dataquest as the first user research hire, we had two primary categories of user profiles. However, we had a hard time identifying them in our survey questions and in our app, so we knew we had to be missing something.
Methods
- Collaborating with our senior designer, we decided to develop new user profiles leveraging the Jobs to Be Done framework.
- I wrote an interview guide to help us learn more about user jobs to be done, and used questions from that guide in every conversation I had with users —both in interviews and usability tests.
- I also held a specific round of talking to 15 users who had cancelled their Dataquest accounts, so we could make sure we had talked to users at every step of the user journey.
- After five months, I had talked to more than 70 users through interviews and usability sessions, and based on those interviews I evolved our two user profiles into five.
Outcomes
To validate the profiles, we created a new survey question which sent to users as part of our quarterly user survey. The answers lined up with our expectations, so we are now able to use this segmentation question to identify user profiles in our app. The validated user profiles were used to spark strategic conversations about Dataquest’s 3-year direction.
