Research Plan

Background

Arcade Mania is a video game chain, with locations all over the country. Their machines all operate on tokens which can be purchased from a central station, operated by two to three employees. Getting tokens from the employees can take several minutes and there is often a line. Customers can also take part in a membership program that is a manual process managed by the employees. The UX team has been hired to identify a new solution that will reduce wait time, understand users, and improve the overall user experience. 

User Research Goals

1. Understand stakeholders’ information needs.
2. Understand users’ needs, motivation, and frustrations. 
3. Provide opportunities and recommendations for the UX designer.

Research Activities

Stakeholder Interviews

Interview stakeholders to understand their workflow and needs. 30-minute 1:1 sessions. 

Process Mapping 

Work with Arcade Mania staff to map the current process for getting tokens and signing up for the customer membership program. 

Existing Data Review

Analyze existing customer data to identify behavior trends and recruit research participants. 

Survey

Survey Arcade Mania customers to understand their needs. Remote and online via Qualtrics. 

Ethnographic Study

Observe Arcade Mania staff and customers over a period of time to understand the current workflow, challenges, and bottlenecks. In person. 

Metrics

Business Goal	UX Goal	Metric
Reduce wait time	Task Success	Time on task
Understand users	User Engagement	Survey data
Improve user experience	User Happiness	Satisfaction data

Timeline

	1/25	1/26	1/27	1/28	1/29	2/1	2/2	2/3	2/4	2/5
Write study materials and scripts	x
Stakeholder interviews		x
Review existing data			x
Write and launch survey				x
Ethnographic study					x	x	x
Close survey							x
Analyze study data and write findings report								x	x
Present findings										x

Dissemination of Findings

Present findings to stakeholders via presentation highlighting study methods, findings, opportunities and recommendations. Deliver PDF with full data and findings report. 

Process

My first goal with user research is to understand who the stakeholders of Arcade Mania are and discover what their needs are so that I can help them understand their customers. Next, is understanding the business challenge so that I can provide enough information to designers to then help solve the challenges. By understanding the current workflow this will help the team understand the problem areas and any bottlenecks that may be affecting the user experience. 

Next, I want to plan user research that will identify customers’ motivations and needs for a better user experience at Arcade Mania. The plan allows me to identify gaps in information and which activities will help fill those gaps so that the team can better understand and empathize with the customers. Identifying business goals and then aligning them to metrics allow me to identify user research methods that will best align to those goals. I planned a variety of activities including a survey to reach a wide customer base and to see the process in person to have the opportunity to observe the service in real time, with real users. 

In the plan, I want the stakeholders to understand how and when user research activities will be completed and when they expect to receive findings. 

Essay

Option 1: Describe a time you had to conduct a research initiative within a set of constraints that affected your ideal research plan. Discuss how you approached this research and what you learned from the experience. 

While working at eMoney Advisor, the ux research team was asked to update existing ux personas and identify user groups to create new ux personas. The team had just hired two new researchers, including an associate research who had little hands on experience research experience. In addition to onboarding the new researchers, we also needed to plan for how we were going to accomplish updating and creating new ux personas. We worked as a team to review existing data and make a project plan.

Our process included stakeholder interviews with product leadership, marketing, design and development to understand what they liked about the existing persons, what worked, and what they needed from a new set of personas. Next, we reviewed the existing usage data from Mixpanel (our analytics tool) and from our voice of the customer portal to highlight user segments that should be represented in the new personas. One of the user segments the team identified as a potential new persona were certified public accountants or CPAs. CPAs used the eMoney platform for “off label” use, the platform was never marketed to this user group, but they found it useful for their business. 

The research team presented the user groups we planned to represent with the new personas and the product leadership team was excited to see a CPA persona because it provided an additional income stream and uncovered an industry opportunity to provide and expanded platform to thousands of additional customers in a shrinking financial planning niche. The leadership team wanted the CPA persona as soon as possible. The challenge arose when the team began recruiting for research participants, it was at the height of tax season and these professionals had no time to give for interviews, no matter the monetary incentive we offered. This group has a heavy season every quarter and is not accessible during these times. 

The research team alerted leadership to this issue and pivoted to secondary research to understand this user segment and provide as much information as we could to product to assist in feature development planning for the next few quarters. And we focused our primary research on other user segments. Once tax season eased up, we were able to speak with a dozen CPAs to then create a persona for this group.

This project was challenging, but keeping nimble and flexible helped us stay on target while still providing value to our product leadership team. Understanding users, their business, and schedules is key in successfully recruiting the right users, at the right time. Scaling our research and learning together made the team successful in updating and creating eight ux personas that highlighted our prime users, as well as, users who we could target for product adoption.