I’ve collected hundreds of hours of user research over the course of my career at Aunt Bertha, but investments in research don’t do much good in a file drawer. To make good on that investment, I’ve crunched hundreds of hours of user interviews and research, to pull out and highlight the insights that can drive the product to address user needs.
Research always runs the risk of becoming a collection of anecdotes if it isn’t attached to numbers. On the other hand, without a voice, numbers can’t tell us why people behave the way they do. By tying those numbers to voices of our users, I was able to attach data that showed us what happened and when, to our user’s explanations of why.
I dived deep into the data, creating hundreds of new reports that tied our features to user performance. I was able to identify trouble spots, places where users dropped off, features that weren’t serving users as well as they could.
The value of understanding our data and sharing out insights like this was instantly recognized by leadership. I was only able to devote a small part of my time to this research project due to other duties, so a position was created for a half-time analyst, to work under me and help me access the data I needed. This half time position became a full time position, and an additional intern was brought on to analyze data.
We had been logging actions in our system for years, but never before had anyone run reports to get the full picture of how users progressed through our system. With data we were able to make decisions that drove us in the right direction, toward our vision of users able to access social services successfully through Aunt Bertha!