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Stick with KPIs when you are lost in your research analysis
Stick with KPIs when you are lost in your research analysis
Get buy-ins from management by presenting findings that relate to company's KPIs
March 6, 2020
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4 min read
When you are struggling with your research report
Sometimes you get lost in your user research, especially when you are drown with tonnes of data. Don’t be scared, always go back to the key metrics that the management cares and you would figure out what to do.
My company, a leading telecom operator in Hong Kong, has recently hired a digital agency to help redesign our consumer website. I worked closely with the agency to run user interviews with 16 users, hearing them speaking out loud their thinking when they purchased their last mobile plans. Acknowledging the limited sample size, I further provided the agency with multiple UX research reports done in the past as extra information sources.
The research was fun the analysis was not. With this vast amount of information, the agency had a problem digesting the data. The first draft of the report was content rich with almost 100 pages. “Elder users are confused with the plan naming”, “young customers who subscribed via telesales perceive that online deals are not a good bargain”, “student plan users are unaware of the roaming day pack” … These are all valid points. But when they are put together, nothing seems particularly memorable.
My company, a leading telecom operator in Hong Kong, has recently hired a digital agency to help redesign our consumer website. I worked closely with the agency to run user interviews with 16 users, hearing them speaking out loud their thinking when they purchased their last mobile plans. Acknowledging the limited sample size, I further provided the agency with multiple UX research reports done in the past as extra information sources.
The research was fun the analysis was not. With this vast amount of information, the agency had a problem digesting the data. The first draft of the report was content rich with almost 100 pages. “Elder users are confused with the plan naming”, “young customers who subscribed via telesales perceive that online deals are not a good bargain”, “student plan users are unaware of the roaming day pack” … These are all valid points. But when they are put together, nothing seems particularly memorable.
Understand what your company wants
The bigger issue is that your management does not have that patience to go through every point with you. Imagine when you have gone through 50 pages but it was like nothing said … I freaked out when I thought of this. Deadline was approaching but the agency, in the meantime, had no clue what to do with the 100 pages of insights. I advised them to do one thing at this time — think about what is the redesign project for? To promote my company’s mobile plans? To help users understand our offerings? To improve customer satisfaction? These are all important aspects we want to achieve for the users. However, there is only one thing your management care — it’s their KPI targets. In my company, it’s the conversion rate for mobile plan subscription.
KPI-driven decisions get buy-ins
Bear in mind that KPIs are what companies use to track performance. It’s something that decides whether your team brings values to your company. This doesn’t mean that fixing users’ painpoints is unimportant. But considering the limited resources and time, if fixing a painpoint does not help convert, this means that the team is spending on the wrong area, at least from the perspective of performance evaluation. By reframing your research report to focus on conversion enhancement, i.e. pinpoint the painpoints that could stop your users from buying, it’s much easier to get buy-ins as this is simply what the management cares.
Bear in mind that KPIs are what companies use to track performance. It’s something that decides whether your team brings values to your company.
Make hypotheses to help meet your KPI targets
“So what are the action items?”, the management could not wait to ask this. They are interested in seeing what could be done to help them meet their KPI targets. Some UX designers would avoid from providing concrete suggestions as they do not want to overpromise. I am a big opponent of this as it is more than annoying for management to hear ambiguous advice. Instead, I would rather propose hypotheses that help achieve the targets. A concrete hypothesis could be something like this, “if we preselect all the required options of a plan, then users could proceed to payment more easily”. There is no way to know whether this would help improve the conversion rate until we launch. But since this is derived from your sound user research, there stands a higher chance that more users would actually proceed to payment. This is a matter of your confidence in research process.
Your process is your support
Your management might not immediately understand why your suggestions make sense. This is the time in which you have to go into detail about your research process. “We observed that users were often confused by the required options (10 out of the 16 users interviewed). It’s common for them to ignore the options as they think these options are not free. Based on this observation from user interview, we think it’s better to preselect the required options to avoid confusion when they try to proceed to payment. We predict that this could help reduce the drop-offs at the plan selection process”. Simple as this might seem, but presenting your processes and even figures are strong support for management to buy in your ideas.
Demonstrate your processes to support your findings and proposed hypotheses.
From time to time, UX designers might get lost when they are analysing the data. It is frustrated when we have done all the hard work doing user research but at the end your management couldn’t care less. When that happens, it’s time for you to rethink your strategy. Tie your research report closely with what your management care, aka KPIs, make hypotheses that help meet the targets, and get prepared to show your processes and details as your support.
This article was also published on Medium.
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