The Vodafone product team approached the UX team for help shaping a design brief for their proposed value-add services for the self-service app.

We offered to do user research to help shape and validate the proposal. It was very important to take them on the journey and co-design with them and users.

While the key business purpose to reduce churn was clear, it was clear I needed to explore and validate user needs and desirability for the proposed services, to avoid spending millions on an idea that users may not want ot use.

Market analysis

My first step was to inform myself and the questions I was preparing for the Product Owner by performing a market analysis of all the services in the proposal.

Clarifying business intentions

To better understand the business need, I workshopped with etc product owner to write out a Mission Statement, which connected the business’s perspective of its need and what user needs it connected to.

This helped clarify the business need as ‘Reduce customer churn’—by making the app more engaging—and the assumed user pain as: ‘No reward for loyalty to staying with Vodafone’.

Inception workshop

With the business need and assumptions clarified, I needed to understand the detail of the Product Owner’s intentions with each proposed service to explore if they were desirable to users.

I ran a workshop with the product owner and relevant stakeholders to brainstorm high-level details of what each proposed service might offer, and how each service experience might work.

Purpose: To provide a UX/SD lens to help shape the product by aligning business needs with user needs, and identify required further research

Goals: Initial Feature list for sense checking with users and technology.

Method: Diverge – going wide to collect ideas, not defining or solutioning (The Dream).

Agenda:
– 1. Purpose
– 2. Present as-is state
– 3. Review the proposal and create a Vision Statement
– 4. Review market analysis
– 5. Ideate potential features and challenges for each proposed service
– 6. Create a Vision Statement for each proposed service
– 7. Recap & next steps

The insight from this forced us to split the four proposed services into seven, which we then wrote a mission statement for for each to see if they related directly to the main business purpose and need.

After discussing, we determined that one service didn’t fit, so we were left with six services to explore with customers.

With clearer intention, I worked with our Lead Researcher to facilitate two focus groups to explore the desirability and sense of the value of each of the proposed services.

Process:
– Prepare workbook
– Recruit and screen
– Book focus group sessions and invite Product Team
– Facilitate
– Analyse and Synthesise

We started by discussing the participants need for a sense of loyalty, to validate this as a need.

With this validated more as a ‘desire’, but still a benefit to business to reduce churn, we explored their desirability for each of the six proposed services by created a workbook for participants and asking them the following questions each service:

Focus Group Insights

The focus groups provided two key pieces of information to inform the product strategy:
— Which proposed services were not desired
— A priority rating for the desired services

By validating the proposed services with customer insight, and by taking the Product Team along the research journey, we saved the team and company much time and expense from investing in exciting but undesirable initiatives.

A recommendation document was provided, including:
– Research summary
– Top Value services
– Guidelines for defining each service
– Considerations and challenges of a points-based system