Research by the LMS Platform Team
Hello. I am Hong Seung-yoon from LMS Platform Team.
I am conducting service planning tasks from pre-research for services.
A research process is essential for successful service planning. My research article series introduces what kind of research was conducted in the recent home shopping UI improvement project and how it was conducted.
Why do you need research?
Before explaining what kind of research, we conducted, we need to know stages of research.
One of the most common design processes is the Double Diamond Process. It consists of four steps: Discover > Define > Develop > Deliver. Research is conducted in each of the 4 stages, but since the project is in the proposal stage, only the necessary stages from Discover to Deliver were carried out in a very short time. (Since the service was not actually implemented, the UT (Usability Test) phase, which should be done in the Deliver stage, was also omitted.)
This article covers the first stage of research, Define, among the four stages.
Discover and Research.
In the early releasing stage of the process, the Discover (researching) stage is a stage where you expand your thinking by collecting as much data as possible. This is a stage of searching the website for service-related data and finding reports or literature materials for the final result of service planning. Analysis of competitor and trend is also conducted at this stage.
This project is to improve A Home Shopping’s web and app environment. Prior to research on competitor, we first identified the nature of home shopping to be improved since it was not possible to investigate all domestic home shopping businesses.
The characteristics of home shopping include the following items.
- What products are main? (Each shopping mall has its main products such as fashion, food, and beauty products.)
- What information is displayed on the main screen?
(Similar to the items above, but what concept the home shopping have needs to be checked. Does it show recommended products to users first? Does it show discount products first, etc.) - How is the menu of websites and apps structured?
- And what benefits does the home shopping mainly provide?
- What services does the home shopping provide?
- Who is the home shopping’s main customer base? (Age, gender, etc.), etc.
A Home Shopping was found to have the following characteristics.
Once its characteristics have been identified, select competitors that match those characteristics well. When selecting a competitor, it is good to search all the many competitors, but it can be more helpful to search for a competitor that is similar to a planned service.
‘A’ home shopping similar to A Home Shopping was selected, and the selection criteria were as follows.
- A shopping mall that sells products similar to A Home Shopping’s and has similar features was selected first.
- Since UXUI improvement includes design, we selected a home shopping mall that has different features from A Home Shopping, but would be nice to benchmark the interface.
- We also selected home shopping with the highest sales in Korea. Having a large number of customers and maintaining high sales is a great competitive advantage.
We have summarized the main features of each home shopping mall and the structure displayed on the main screen. Through this process, you can compare the characteristics of A Home Shopping with those of its competitors. While comparing features, you can derive planning elements that can be benchmarked or strengths that other competitors do not have. However, the above step is comparison of service from the perspective of a planner.
How do its customers feel?
For this, move on to the next step, Define. This is a stage where you can concentrate on combining the results that you have gathered widely. Define the customers who use and will use the service as its personas, and clearly define the problems to be improved. In order to converge thoughts, a One-on-One interview was conducted at this stage.
This will be addressed in detail in the next article.
[Last Article] Research Design
For successful research, goals for the research should be set. Otherwise, in the process, you may miss out on the information needed to know or the project may go in a completely different direction. Pointless research may extend to pointless design and pointless service.
Decide who to ask and what questions you will ask. When selecting a research target, it can be classified into people who mainly use only A Home Shopping, and people who use other home shopping other than A Home Shopping. This is to compare A Home Shopping with its competitors. There will be questions about what characteristics its main customers have, what patterns they purchase from the home shopping, why they use it, or why they do not use it compared to its competitors. And structure your questions according to your goals
The above method is called in-depth interview design during research design. By conducting in-depth interviews with customers, it is possible to derive information on type of customer and a customer journey map according to the type. How to design an interview will be covered in the next part.
