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Metromile—like any other business—struggles to figure out what’s most important to improve in the customer experience. There are many ways to answer. Many of which can take considerable amounts of time, money, and energy. However, speed and cost-effectiveness are of the upmost importance to any business. Therefore, at Metromile we emphasized a lean, iterative approach to establish a V1 of top UX needs, a framework to be applied within the business, and more broadly, for years to come.
To achieve a clear understanding of our customers’ needs, we set out to make sense of the many sets of data to which we already had access, while adding new user insight to the mix. Through organization, normalization, and speed we created a comprehensive understanding of our strategic customer opportunity areas. The value of this product was it’s use in prioritizing, planning, ideating, and education of diverse stakeholders (i.e. engineers, marketers, product management, designers, and leadership).
View related UXR best practices learned from this project and more. See 12 Frameworks to Assist in Data Analysis for how to analyze user research data for insights, and 4 Elements of an Effective User Story for how to write user stories from user insights.
research planning structured analysis opportunity prioritization opportunity quantification user story writing
First, we amassed all available insights and data from existing sources. NPS surveys, past research projects, agency work, voice of customer channels, operations feedback, and more all provided a solid foundation. The advantage of these insights was they had already been generated. We were hungry for more customer data 🔍. Anything meaningful about our user experience that has been previously found was justified. However, this data needed organization so that we could accurately compare & contrast.
Second, we established a normalization structure to the data. Without this step, we would be unable to identify major themes and opportunity areas, since everything existing in different formats. We began to analyze the insights, and compiled into user stories (“As a customer interacting with [X], I need [Y], so that/because [Z]”), along with alliterative titles.
Through this process, we were able to remove duplicates, begin to identify themes and sub-themes, and generally analyze for meaning. This set us up for proper synthesis, after which we succeeded in generating our first rendition of the top UX needs spanning the product experience.
Third, we set off to prioritize the newfound UX need statements. To accomplish this, we dug for supporting quantitative data (financials, NPS scores, user behavior metrics, etc.). This provided hard numbers to the qualitative buckets. Additionally, we held product manager working sessions, operations feedback sessions, and leadership reviews to gather others’ perspective in terms of importance. As a result, we had generated a clear understanding of what mattered to the user, as well as the business. This gave us a platform to decide what to emphasize most moving forward.
Final steps included conducting quarterly road-mapping exercises, adding more details through ongoing project research, hosting ideation sessions for focused opportunities, and ongoing management of the UX needs backlog. We learned a great deal through this initiative. The main benefit is the process can be systematically scaled, over time and industry. At Metromile, the framework will establish a virtuous cycle for itself. Furthermore, we’ll be able to leverage this structured approach to future businesses and challenges.
