Project Overview

In order to help Colony find product market fit, I used generative user research in order to uncover our users’ motivations and needs so that we could design, prioritize, and develop new features. This research led us to a product insight and a new feature we called “Suggestions”.

Challenges
• Finding insights from ambiguous user interviews.
• Translating and prioritizing this insight into a new feature.
• Launching the MVP feature within the application.

My Role
• Lead and conducted user research with 9 qualitative interviews.
• Collaborated with product to uncover user insights.
• Led design process to translate insight into a new feature.
• Created sketches and prototypes to find the flow
• Assisted with high fidelity deseign assets for developer handoffs.

Project Team
• Collin, co-founder and product owner.
• Karol, UI designer.
• Raul + Chris, developers.

Conducting qualitative interviews

To start the project I used generative research to find insights which can lead to new ideas. In total, I conducted 9 user interviews to understand our user needs and generate user insights. These users were key contributors to open source projects or other blockchain companies, Colony’s target users.

These user interviews lead to thousands of data points in the form of user stories. I then spent time synthesizing the data to find patterns and key insights. I organized this in the Airtable below.

One story in particular captured our attention. In this story, our user explains that "high quality labor can be achieved with a proper reward system that allows people to do what they want.”

This story helped us realize that open-source projects and blockchain organizations rely on the ideas of the community to be successful. This pattern showed up through other user interviews and led us to our key insight:

Creating a user journey map

With this insight in mind, I used these user interviews to craft a user journey map to better understand how ‘bottom up’ contributions are typically created in open-source organizations.

Ideating and prototyping a new concept

Using the customer journey map as a starting place, I facilitated an ideation session with the larger team. We used ‘How might we’s’ to brainstorm possible solutions spaces and then began to sketch new ideas.

I then used these sketches to prototype a user flow within our application. This prototype allowed me to collaborate with our developers and product managers. We then simplified the idea in order to ship quickly and test our core concepts.

Final designs

Below you can see our final design for ‘Suggestions’. We were able to simplify the feature and launch it quickly into the market to learn. I’ve highlighted some of the key features below.

1. The community can suggest features, report bugs, or propose tasks they want to work on.

2. Upvotes allow the community to signal the most important suggestions to the admins.

3. Admins can accept suggestions, change the status to “not planned”, or delete outdated content.

Results

After launching the Suggestions feature, it became the most used part of Colony. This confirmed our user research and product strategy. By opening up the top of the funnel to the community, we were able to generate more ideas that became tasks. The increase in tasks also resulted in the increase in total value moving through our product.

Lessons
• Translating user insights into innovative features.
• Using a customer journey to guide ideation and prototyping.
• Working with engineers to simplify a feature so it can be launched and tested.
• Trusting qualitative research to launch something new and exciting for our users.

Next Steps
• Usability tests and feedback from users.
• Design and launch a model that allows comments.
• User research on tipping for a good suggestion.