Geekwire

User Research / Methodologies

I decided to cast a wide net with the initial research because there were many features we believe could be implemented. The methods I used were user interviews, usability lab studies and surveys because it provided me with valuable data between behavioral, attitudinal, qualitative, and quantitative.

We were commissioned by Geekwire to identify current usability issues and then replace or remove current features. I conducted 5 formal user interviews that included a discussion guide and voice recording in addition to another 4 informal conversations.

User Research / Affinity Mapping

The goal of the user interviews were to provide enough insight to create an affinity map to help identify trends and possibly the scope for our solution. After organizing over 100 post it notes, the affinity map yielded 9 “I” statements. The 3 statements that we prioritized due to the number of notes per statement were:

User Research / Survey and Task Analysis

The initial goal of the user survey was to help screen out participants for the user interviews. However after reviewing the results, with 89% of our users wanting to follow current events and 83% of the users on a mobile platform. I unexpectedly found that it also helped validate our hypothesis and the platform to design for.

I conducted a usability lab study to help understand how users behave with the app. By asking the participants to speak out loud, they mentioned how it was cumbersome to navigate through the app and how it was not intuitive compared to other apps like Flipboard or ESPN. One task that I asked the users were to find a podcast by a particular author, and although the categories section was a very extensive list, it wasn’t a major issue because it was in alphabetical order, but the participants did voiced their frustration over a missing search bar to locate the particular podcast.

User Research / Persona

After completing my data synthesis, I would like to introduce everyone to Alex Young, She’s a 29 year old developer working at a startup company in Seattle who was recently engaged. She considers herself a techie and she’s always trying to stay ahead of the curve when it comes to innovative technology. She’s not your average passive-aggressive Seattleite, meaning she doesn’t have an issue vocalizing any concerns she might have. She believes that everything should be simple, upfront and transparent. One of her biggest pet peeves are websites that make her “add to cart” before she can see the sales price. It frustrates her that she is not able to get the information she wants right away.

User Research / Storyboard

Since Alex is the only software developer in the company, she’s constantly in meetings. Alex uses any free time she has to help her fiance Mark, plan their wedding. With everything that she has on her plate, Alex doesn’t have time to explore what’s happening in the startup industry in Seattle so she feels behind and uninformed. One of the apps she stopped using notified her that there was an new update available so she decides to give it a shot. After the update, to her surprise she was able to curate the content that she is interested in which makes her happy because she doesn’t have to waste time filtering through content that isn’t relevant to her.

User Research / Problem Statement

Alex needs to stay informed with relevant tech news because she’s busy balancing her career and life outside of work.

We believe that by creating a method to curate the content categories we will provide Alex with the news she cares about.

We will know this to be true when she uses the GeekWire app more frequently.

Future Development

For future development, we believe that refining the curation process by adding tags will help our users filter more relevant content. With the tags filter, our future users are able to see all articles that fit into specific categories, as well as other tags that are also related to the article if they were interested in exploring other related articles.