Refer&Earn: Increasing user base

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Background

Increasing the user base is a major goal for mobile applications. For Lock&Stock (hereafter L&S), I have worked on several user research studies to investigate the potential of attracting new users and of course to keep the existing users happy by providing a seamless user experience.

L&S is a mobile application that helps students to stay away from their phones and accumulate keys, which can be used to unlock discounts. A win-win situation for students, enabling them to focus on their studies and get rewarded for it. Next to that, it also provides students the opportunity to get scholarships when applying to universities through the app.

In this case study, I will describe one of the usability studies I worked on, to better understand the pain points of users and potential usability issues with the new referral process, which entitles the referrers to earn a commission when the referred user enrols to a university through the app.

My role

I was one of the user researchers at L&S when this project took place. Together with my colleague we interchangeably lead the interviews, and the end-to-end process, such as writing the research plan and discussion guide, recruitment, analysis&synthesis, and writing the usability report.

We also worked alongside our CTO and our product designers. They were present in some of the research sessions and closely monitored the synthesis part.

Timeline

Overall, it was a short project taking only 2 weeks. The tight timeline was something that I got accustomed to working at a startup. Everything had to move fast. For this project, the timeline looked as follows:

• Discussing the project: 1 day
• Preparation (writing research plan/discussion guide and recruitment): 4 days
• Conducting research: 3 days
• Writing report: 2 days

Research Statement and goals

We wanted to understand how users think about referring products to their friends and how they interact with L&S app to improve the app’s user experience.

Goals of usability study:

1. Assess the user experience of the referral section (prototype)
2. Discover how users are referring products and their experiences
3. Evaluate whether users understand the mechanics of the new referral system

Methodology

The study comprised of three parts and the whole session took place remotely via Google Meet:

1. An in-depth one-on-one interview process at the beginning in which the wants and needs, and the perceptions of the users regarding referral systems was discussed. This was done to get ideas for next releases of the app.
2. After the pre-interaction interview the participant was sent a link to the Figma prototype and invited to share the screen. The participants were then asked to test the prototype by following the tasks given by the interviewer. The screens had been redesigned, so when the participants interacted with the high-fidelity prototype, they gave their thoughts and opinions on it.
3. A post-interaction interview allowed us to gain a more in-depth perspective on the app from participants and hear their pain points, likes, dislikes and ideas.

Recruitment criteria and process

The main target demographic for this study were users of the L&S app who preferably hadn’t used the referrals page before. We also included non-users to the study to get an unbiased point of view and fresh perspectives on the redesigned option. A screener survey was part of the recruitment.

We recruited participants by posting an ad in the app. As an incentive the participants were provided 200keys (in-app) for taking part in the research study.

Usability Study

We had 5 journeys in total that we wanted the users to walk us through and timed the tasks, so users had to move in a certain order. We did this to assess how easy it is for the users to finish a task. Since we were dealing with a clickable prototype, before prompting the users we had to make sure that they would not start exploring the prototype themselves.

Outputs and deliverables

After each session, I reflected on the session with the key takeaways, pain points and interesting findings. When we finished all the sessions we started writing the usability report, and upon completion presented it to the team. It was highly appreciated, and the team was inspired to use the insights for further iterations.

Impact

This piece of research helped the company understand how the users are thinking and interacting with the referral system. One of the key findings was for example that the users did not understand how commissions work. This is an interesting finding not only for the design team, but also the marketing team. It shows that the way they are reaching out to the users regarding the referrals needs a different approach.

Next steps & recommendations

In general the users were satisfied and they easily navigated through the prototype. It was a short usability study with some interesting findings, among others:

• It was unclear to users how they would be compensated.
• For university-going participants the incentive for using the app was lacking.

As soon as we presented the results, the team immediately started working on adding information in the ‘learn more’ section clarifying how the commission works. The second finding presented here is still under development by the time of writing.

Reflections

What went well:

• Adjustments in the content and design were made based on this research
• It provided insights beyond its use especially for the marketing team
• Stakeholders participated in the research and gained first-hand impressions from users
• Applied lesson learnt from previous testing: users were kindly requested to listen to the prompts without clicking on stuff. This allowed users to take time to see what there is on the screens and share their thoughts.
• Applied lesson learnt from previous testing: thanks to the buffer time between interviews, it was easy to accommodate changes
• Applied lesson learnt from previous testing: Having all links (to the prototype/excel sheet) in the notes document made it easier to navigate to the other links. No time was wasted searching for the links while conducting the interview.

Challenges:

• Recruitment was difficult, as we started recruiting last-minute. I suggested creating a research pool after this research, and we started working on that.
• There were still some last-minute no-shows from participants. Next time, we agreed on getting more participants than needed to account for the no-shows.
• Participants were eager to explore the prototype themselves. We had to ask them before giving prompts to not click on anything and tell us what goes on in their head, so we could time the task. After this research, we agreed on conducting a more free-flowing usability study in cases where the time on task doesn’t really matter.