Usability Tests ▫ Continuous Discovery

Intro

In 2023, Origin was going through a massive strategic change. Moving from a B2B2C product to a direct-to-consumer strategy. This process was informed by the Personas and Segmentation project. Besides figuring out what kind of message we needed to send to be successful, there were many improvements that needed to be made in the customer-facing app itself.

Our challenge

We had a short timeline of 3 months for a complete redesign and rebranding, this included every little interaction inside the app, the style guide and all brand assets. We needed to support prototypes that were incremental improvements and iterations instead of waiting to testing the new version top-to-bottom.

Research Process

Informing the Redesign

A few months prior, we conducted an Information Architecture audit and assessed quality of all our menu hiearchy and content titles as a request from the Design and Content teams. We revisited that report and conducted additional audits using heuristics and data analysis to identify features that needed extra effort on the redesign.

Information Architecture Report

Through a quantitative Tree Test and Qualitative cardsorting, we were able to uncover problems in our menu hierarchy, page and content titles.

Previous Research Insights

We revisited previous insights to find problem areas that might not already have been solved

Recruiting, Rituals and Routine

Our main documentation header looked like this!

After the team started working on improvements, it was time for us to plan how could we make this process go as efficiently and smoothly as possible. We worked on a documentation to promote shared understanding of this project, its goals, the schedule and what kind of responsibilities we would share or split.

We decided to work on weekly sprints. We started the week recruiting for sessions to happen on Thursday afternoons/nights and Friday mornings. We met the team on Thursday midday to gather research needs and work on a script together.

Weekly Reports

We moderated and recorded 4-8 sessions every week due to this system and well-oiled research operations practices. With 45-1h per participant, this produced a ton o video material for us to review for the weekly report that we had only a couple of hours to produce. We were able to do so thanks to organizing our knowledge base beforehand.