Mapping the Customer
Journey
This is a research project I led at Microsoft to improve a product's use through a better understanding of the user journey using in-depth interviews.
Skills Used:
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User Interviews
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Journey Mapping
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Personas
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Solution Design
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Presentation
Some information has been removed or modified due to confidentiality.
Context & Research Goals
Sales assets were complex, designed to be used both by internal salespeople and external customers. In order to optimize the assets for both groups, I needed deep understanding of the sales process and what users wanted.
Methods
To gain a deep understanding, I decided to perform a set of user interviews on people with various roles. I created the screener, discussion guide, ran recruitment, and conducted the interviews.
Crucial Insights
Through careful synthesis of notes and affinity mapping the common themes I identified, we developed a comprehensive view of the customer journey and what specific pain points we could address through asset improvements.
Ensuring Impact
In the middle of the synthesis, a large-scale merger caused us to pivot and made our primary users our secondary users. I then did desk research to compare our new primary user and implemented changes to our insights aligned to our new initiative.
Key Learnings
In the pivot, we had to gain a quick understanding of our new primary users. If I had more time before our findings were due, I would have pushed to conduct a set of interviews on 2-3 on our new primary users to deepen the understanding.
After each interview my collaborators and I added to our brainstorming to keep insights fresh.
Through one set of interviews, we were able to gain a representative sample of users.
I added impact to insights by bringing individual quotes from the interviews to drive the point home.
Through interviews, I found that asset discovery and searchability were an issue so I designed and implemented a file and asset naming system based on what our users look for.
Through the interviews, I found that many users needed more context and guidance in using the assets.
For additional findings and learnings, please contact me at jackmizell12@gmail.com