1. Revolutionising customer service
Teleperson is a mobile app solution looking to revolutionise the customer service in the United States for both consumers and companies via an AI-driven app.
When I came into Teleperson, the product was already at the mid-late design phase with interactive prototypes and the start-up was about to go on funding rounds. However, there had been no design research on the product despite being in an advanced stage of design.
Following requirements gathering with stakeholders, I was able to identify and frame the problems we wanted to solve through UX research:
Accordingly, I established the following goals for the research:
- Exploring the user base potential and product-market fit of the product, to be able to answer whether product solves an unmet user need.
- Identifying any potential design concerns to be addressed to make sure users can effectively understand what the app is about and can go through the critical user journeys.
2. My research process
1. Heuristic evaluation
As the limited budget did not allow us to conduct enough usability tests to discover all the issues with the prototype, I conducted a heuristic evaluation of the prototype to identify usability problems of individual UI elements and see how they impact the overall user experience on a budget. This also enabled me to generate insights quickly while still recruiting for the user tests and to kick off the iteration process. To do so I applied the usability principles of Jakob Nielsen, the “10 heuristics for user-interface design”.
2. Combined usability testing and user interviews
Working under budget constraints required a fast and cheap method for concept validation and prototype testing. Thus, I combined formative usability testing with a pre-and post-test questionnaire as inGoogle Venture’s ‘five-act interview’.
Pre-test questions were designed to inquire about the user’s general customer service experience while the post-test questions collected opinions on the product and user experience. This method was ideal for the overall goals of the project as it allowed me to gain deep insights in a short amount of time and a limited budget.
The task scenarios given to participants during the interview aimed to evaluate:
- Whether the app was able to communicate to users what the app is about and what they can do on it.
- Whether users were able to use the app to get in contact with customer service of a particular service or goods provider about an issue.
- Whether they were able to connect to their friends and see their reviews.
3. Affinity diagramming
After the sessions, I organized my usability testing notes on an affinity diagram and looked for repeating patterns. Finally, I sorted the identified the usability issues by severity, after considering the impact of the issue on the task success rate.
3. What I found out
Overall, the sessions showed that the user feedback for the Teleperson app’s concept was favorable and users agreed that they would use the app.
“Teleperson offers better practice for something we do so often such as customer service.” Quote from a study participant
The top three key insights from the sessions were:
- Users did not clearly understand the value of the app after onboarding, even once on the homepage. The copy of the onboarding pages didn't always match user’s mental model and the homepage assumed prior knowledge of what the app did.
- If the wait time is long, users tend to multi-task while reaching out to customer service in varied ways. The multimedia hub function on the app would have to be overly complex to cater to user's varied needs, and therefore it was not evaluated in a positively by participants.
- Some users have a strong preference for texting while others prefer calling. However, Teleperson’s AI bot always required calling a customer service representative. This pointed out the need for Teleperson App to give the users the possibility to solve their customer service query by text only or call only.
4. What my research insights achieved
My design recommendations based on the user research are currently being implemented by the designers at Teleperson. Teleperson, in the meanwhile, is still in the process of raising the seed capital. So far, the research findings have:
- Decreased development costs following a critical product development decision based on the research insights.
- Identified 18 usability problems (8 high, 5 medium, 5 low severity) reducing the cost of those fixes later in the design phase by 60-90%.
- The captured user sentiment has peaked the interest of investors, with discussions of funding ongoing.
5. Challenges & trade-offs
Since the start-up was still in its early stages, there was no funding available for the recruitment of UX research participants. The limited budget posed a challenge for both on the choice of research methods and the recruitment of study participants.
Under the given constraints, I recruited people corresponding to the recruitment criteria in our existing network and had to limit the number of participants to three (excluding one pilot session). In an ideal scenario, I would have included at least five participants with varying digital skills in the usability test.
A bigger budget would have allowed me to conduct in-depth user interviews in addition to separate user tests, which would have served us better for exploring the pain points of users regarding their customer service experience.
Another difficulty I faced during the research process was finding out that one of one usability sessions had failed to be saved. After this realization, I took the time to write down as much as I could remember to add to my notes from the session.
6. What I learned
Working as a solo UX researcher at Teleperson was a challenging and enriching experience. Being the only user researcher required communicating and justifying my choices of research methods to stakeholders as well as adapting to the needs and limitations of the business.
In this process, I also learned to prioritize research results and communicate them in a easily digestible format rather than providing highly detailed documents. And crucial for remote research, to always make sure the recordings are saved after sessions in addition to backing-up recordings as soon as possible.
