Audience
Marketing department of a well-known musical equipment manufacturer
Team
Myself, working in consultation with the client
Challenge
Learn about the workflow of target customers in order to inform website redesign. (Winter, 2017)
techniques & tools
Loosely structured one-on-one interviews, which included watching participants reconstruct their own research & purchase flow.
outcome
I planned, recruited for and conducted 23 live, remote interviews to collect feedback about buying needs and patterns. Participants came from the United States, United Kingdom, Germany, South Korea and Mexico.
Background
A global manufacturer of musical equipment engaged the agency I was working for to assist with the redesign of their website. One of their primary goals was to move from maintaining multiple regional sites into a single global website.
It was important for them to understand how customers of their products, both professional and amateur, used the internet in general and company websites in specific to while researching and purchasing musical equipment.
Recruit
The manufacturer provided us with the names and contact information of a number of their professional customers, 9 of whom agreed to participate in the interviews. To recruit amateurs, I used respondent.io, creating a screener using their tools, and targeting ads through their network.
The screener looked for a recent purchase of equipment in the category this manufacturer served, levels of familiarity or not with the client and its competitors, fluency in English (since I was conducting the interviews, and we did not have budget for translation or local researchers).
Side note: working with respondent.io was very good. Their service was definitely price-competitive with hiring a research firm to do a recruit, the recruitment in the U.S. was very fast, and the company was upfront and correct when they told me that the recruit in Asia was going to take longer.
Ultimately I reached 14 retail consumers in the United States, United Kingdom, Germany, South Korea and Mexico. Retail customers were paid an honorarium; courtesy thank yous for the professional participants were handled by the client.
Interviews
I moderated all of the interviews, which generally lasted around 50 minutes. The style of the interview was conversational, not a task-based usability test. Instead we focused on
- use of the internet at large for researching a purchase of musical equipment,
- the user’s needs for the company’s website in general, and
- other influences on the purchase process.
I was free to follow interesting turns in the conversation in order to gain deeper understanding of the participant’s work as it related to the client. As part of each interview, I turned the participant’s attention to either the client’s website or a competitor’s website in order to gain additional insight. Audio recording and captured screen-sharing facilitated note-taking.
Findings
Results were presented as part of a day-long meeting and in writing. Some of the critical learnings:
- For a particular kind of professional, the website was absolutely unimportant to their daily work. They used the company’s products frequently, but had no need to refer to the website.
- For another group of professionals, the website was a daily stop during their activities, in order to double-check product specifications and get other details.
- For most consumers, the entire product purchase journey took place on Google—as a source for reviews, often of the “10 best” listicle variety—and Amazon, with no need to visit the client’s website at all.
- South Korean customers (who we hoped were a qualified proxy for the real target: China) used local/Asian equivalents of Google and Amazon.
Out of my findings, the highest-level takeaway was for the site to offer
- more educational material and
- richer product detail pages,
to capture customers who use Google for product education and Amazon for final purchase decisions.