How customer research helped deliver a 10% increase in share-of-wallet
Using regular customer feedback, I helped a mobile app developer increase their wallet-share, and built the business case for further customer research.
Project outcomes delivered
- Redesign that positioned Sportsbet as the leader in a competitive category
- Design and product decisions guided with an outside-in view of customer experience
- Qualitative observation of pain points that led to design improvements
- Quantitative evaluation that prioritised building the most valuable features
The research brief
As UX Researcher it was my responsibility to support the decisions of a team of 15 product owners, 15 designers and an executive board.
Product
- Sportsbet is Australia’s leading mobile app in the gaming category
- Half a million customers spend up to $1 million per day
- Thousands of products across two websites and two mobile apps
Business goals
- Differentiate the Sportsbet experience from competitors by being responsive to customers
- Experiment and test to deliver innovative, targeted and safe experiences
- Support development by mitigating potential risks of negative reactions to change
Customers
- Market share is driven by customer choice of provider
- Customer choice is driven by quality experiences and rewards
- Most customers regularly choose two or more providers
- High-value customers have low loyalty and switch regularly
Stakeholder engagement
I needed to engage stakeholders to gain support for my research plan and objectives.
Gained support for a 12-month research plan
- Identified the people and processes needed for my plan to succeed
- Secured funding needed to set up a lab and incentivise customer participation
- Collaborated with stakeholders to prioritise work requests, backlog and spend
- Worked with security teams to use customer data in a safe, secure and policy-compliant way
- Consulted broadly to guide interpretation of findings and get buy-in on actions taken
- Published high quality reports and built a loyal readership list of thought leaders
Set up a centre of excellence for design research
- Dispelled myths about qualitative research and got quantitative practitioners onside
- Built confidence in findings by correlating qualitative insights with quantitative data
- Mentored junior team members in contemporary UX research methods
- Regularly monitored and reported on the impact of changes on user experience
- Shifted conversations by live streaming video of research sessions
- Built a searchable knowledge base to increase re-use and visibility of research insights
My research approach
Found opportunities to guide decisions
- Embedded myself into the product team (not the development team!)
- Unpacked solutions and assumptions into questions
- Recommended appropriate research methods (not just surveys!)
- Answered research questions and gathered hundreds of new insights
- Participated in regular product ideation and discovery sessions
- Shared design insights the day after, followed by weekly reports
Validated evidence by correlating attitudes and behaviours
- Managed participant recruitment, using data to target specific cohorts
- Observed pain points of customers as they used their preferred products
- Quantitatively measured severity and impact of qualitative issues found
- Prioritised actions taken using quantitative data to size each opportunity
Integrated research into agile development
- Designed a research process that integrated into fortnightly development sprints
- Researched features for each upcoming sprint and shared insights before build commenced
- Collaborated with stakeholders to prioritise research request backlogs
- Collaborated with stakeholders to agree on the value and urgency of opportunities found
My deliverables
I created artefacts as needed to support uptake of evidence. For each research activity that meant writing up a full report every two weeks detailing the results of each analysis.
Strategic activities delivered
- Facilitated 4 stakeholder workshops to help identify market opportunities
- Undertook 25 stakeholder interviews to discover objectives
- Designed a research canvas to help form objectives for activities
Quantitative research delivered
- Designed and built 14 quantitative studies
- Surveyed 1,600 customer participants
- Statistical analysis of millions of data points
- Reported trends at 95% confidence
Qualitative research delivered
- Facilitated 40 contextual interviews
- Facilitated 2 customer journey mapping workshops
- Facilitated 111 one-on-one qualitative usability tests
- Qualitative analysis of 3,500 behavioural observations
Stakeholder management
- Wrote 50 research briefs to get buy-in on research activities and manage spend
- Wrote 50 extensive reports with observations, evidence and recommendations
- Presented fortnightly summaries of findings to build influence of research insights
- Led 20 prioritisation sessions to gain commitment on actions taken
Key design challenges
Here’s a small sample of the types of insights generated from my customer research.
For each finding, evidence was written up in a report, analysis was presented, recommendations were discussed, and follow-up actions were prioritised.
Help customers to discover products
I researched customer discovery of entry, exit and re-entry points for core journeys like registration, product selection, and product purchase.
Product choice added flexibility but placed pressure on users to manage choice complexity
Useful product suggestions required intuiting customers’ current mindset and goals beyond historical actions
Poor personalisation trained customers to ignore marketing and product suggestions
I researched influence opportunities for omni-channel journeys (radio, TV, print and in-person)
Match content to customer mindsets
Recruiting customer participants with carefully managed customer cohort data meant that I could match prototype content to product preferences and better simulate machine learning personalisation.
Recruited participants that were representative users of the content being tested
Increased content relevancy prompted exploration and increased perception of service value
Presentation of personalisation was critical to mitigate ‘creepy’ monitoring that degraded trust
Personalisation enhanced the memorability and enjoyment of key ‘brand moments’
Ease core journey friction points
By observing participants as they used the product in a naturalistic way, the impact of friction points became clear.
Poor accessibility on data entry forms increased uncaught human error for important information
Journeys without consistent error recovery increased anxiety, sense of loss, and degraded trust
Higher error rates observed on small elements near mobile screen edges
User accuracy was impeded near physical edge bevels of wrap-around mobile device screens
Redesign shopping cart journeys
Initial experience of product innovation relies more heavily on journey design than instruction.
Multiple journey entry points were required to complete combination products
Established behaviours influence combination product choice more than instructions
Unclear eligibility in marketing messages caused disappointment and loss
Lower value offers prompted unfavourable comparisons
Demonstrated value
Stakeholder influence
- Stakeholder engagement during research drove a 90% uptake of 300 recommendations
- Stakeholder video reviews captured 3,500 observations that had immediate influence
Measured impact
- Before and after metrics indicated a 20% uplift in customer satisfaction over the previous design
- Metric uplift and positive feedback informed the decision to launch the new design
- Key financials were up 10% within 2 weeks of launch of the new design
Increased customer engagement
- Most active customers installed the new app within 2 weeks of launch and gave favourable reviews
- Share-of-wallet spend on the new app was $100,000/day above trend within 2 weeks of launch
A solid business case for research
Costs
Research costs comprise software, recruitment, incentivises and consultancy at $300,000
Growth
Measured growth is 10%, comprising $1,000,000/day (actual) minus $900,000/day (previous trend)
Cost recovery
At 10% growth, $300,000 cost is recoverable 3 days after launch of the new design
