Interviewing users to discover the platform's perceived value
Torre launched a value testing initiative to make sure its platform and services were aligned with the user's needs and goals, Torre launched a value testing initiative.
This effort resulted in 31 new initiatives added to our product roadmap, 10 user testimonials collected, and 12 user personas created — all aimed at ensuring the product supports users in achieving their job-to-be-done.
Let me walk you through the process, constraints, learnings and findings of my biggest project as a UX Researcher.
Company:
Torre
Role:
UX Researcher
Team involved:
Head of Design, Product Designers, UX Researchers
Tools used:
Notion, Zoom, Paper, Pen
What is Torre?
Torre is an AI-powered platform that helps job seekers find job opportunities and talent seekers find ideal candidates. By analyzing thousands of data points and leveraging its proprietary algorithm, Torre tailors matches based on skills, preferences, roles and many other factors.
Being a double sided market, Torre has two types of users: job seekers and talent seekers. In my case, I was in charge of doing the research for the talent seeker side. This could include independent recruiters, headhunters, startup founders, HR managers, or any other creative/fancy name we use to call people who recruit talent.
What was the problem?
Like many startups, Torre was in a constant cycle of iteration to achieve product-market fit using the job-to-be-done framework (read more about this framework in this blog post by bubble.io).
In simple terms, what this framework says is that a customer is going to hire a product/service to help them get a job done. For example, if I'm driving to work in the morning and I'm hungry, I'll buy a milkshake to satisfy my hunger, which would by my job-to-be-done. You may ask why a milkshake and not a sandwich or a banana, well I'll let Clayton Christensen (the man who coined the term himself) explain it much better in the video below.
Anyways, a key component of this framework is understanding user functional and emotional needs and pain points through research. What was the problem? Torre's research efforts lacked the consistency, organized and strategic approach needed to identify those needs and pain points and generate actionable insights.
Go to the minute 2:53 for Clayton's explanation of why users bought a milkshake driving to work, over other options.
What was the process to solve it?
To tackle the challenge, we leveraged a newly developed UX research guideline, co-developed with the Design team, to conduct comprehensive value-testing interviews for each segment within our talent seeker users.
Step 1: Segmenting users
As seen in the diagram below, the first step was segmenting the users considering their type of service, their stage in the conversion funnel, and other special segments. Ensuring a specific understanding of each segment's needs, pain points and perceptions.
Step 2: Getting talent seekers to interview
Once segmented, I needed to align with the Operations and Sales team to reach out to talent seekers and request 30 minutes of their time. For those who weren't already Torre users, what we called the 'Newly aware' segment, I cold message talent seekers on LinkedIn, Slack and Discord communities.
Believe it or not, this was the hardest part of the entire process. Why? Because people are usually not willing to give 30 minutes of their time without something in return, and yes we didn't offer anything in exchange to avoid any bias.
Step 3: Running the interview
Some of the talent seekers ghosted us, even after scheduling an interview. But for those who did show up, it was time to interview them. In a very summarized way, below is how we set up our interview methodology when approaching value tests.
Step 4: Reporting all the findings
The research aimed to evaluate Torre’s perceived value across four dimensions: functional, monetary, social, and psychological (if you want to deep dive into how each value dimension works, you can read the research guideline here).
All the findings from the interviews were grouped by segment and compiled into a report for each segment. Each report included:
Value perception across the four dimensions.
User personas based on the interviewed talent seekers.
User testimonials, when consent was given to share them as marketing material.
A list of ideas and actionable items to improve the platform based on the findings and insights.
Key takeaways and learnings
Overall, across all user segments I…
Interviewed 30 talent seekers and gathered 10 testimonials to be used on our website.
Created 12 user personas to reflect diverse user needs and behaviors based on the talent seekers interviewed.
Proposed 31 efforts to be added to the product roadmap.
And personally, I learned…
That getting participants is probably the hardest part of the process, so plan ahead of time and always ask for referrals to keep the pipeline going.
To remind participants of the interview length upfront, to avoid stalling or rushing.
To not worry about taking notes right away, and instead focus fully on the interview to avoid missing insights or losing the chance to follow up with questions that might lead to them.
Sadly, I can't share the full research details or testimonials, but I can share some examples of user personas that were created 😬
