Generative Research: Understanding Motivation and Goal Setting
Client overview
Flowductive is a wellness app that helps people manage their time. The app offers a time blocking schedule, a Pomodoro timer and social features. The purpose of this project was to get a better understanding of what motivates people to be productive.
Duration: 2 week project
Tools: Zoom, Otter.ai, Notion, Figjam
Team: 4 UX Researchers
Methods: In depth one-on-one remote interviews, Competitive analysis
My Role & Responsibilities
I was a Co-Lead UX Researcher on a team of 6 researchers. I was responsible for leading the project which included managing the team and participating in the research process at every step. I was also responsible for creating a research repository, conducting interviews and usability tests, analyzing the data and presenting the findings to stakeholders.
The Challenge
Research Process
Target Audience
Recruitment:
For our recruitment, we did not have a budget and therefore had to do recruitment using the snowball method. We were able to tap into the art community through contacts in the art world. We also still used a screener survey to get the best candidates.
Participant Criteria:
Age: 18-35
Current college students or young professionals, Actively using a time management or productivity tool
03
Research Goals
01
Flowductives' purpose is to help college students be more productive and efficient with their time. Although our app was offering a solution, our retention rate was extremely low. In addition, no prior research had been done, which meant we did not have any foundational understanding of why users might use our app and what motivates them to be productive. This was a problem because when our product is not meeting a need, we are not retaining users.
Understand the competitive landscape and what other apps are offering
Constraints
02
Uncover users motivation and pain points when trying to manage time and be productive
Our team ran into a budget and time constraint that ultimately led to poor participant recruitment. Since we only had a budget of $50 total, we were unable to outsource recruitment and lacked the ability to offer an appropriate incentive. This led to getting a small number of interviews and less qualified candidates.
Identify the tools people currently use to help them with time management
Method 01: Competitive Analysis
Explore
We conducted a competitive analysis in order to get a better understanding of both direct and indirect competitors. By researching what features they offer and where they are failing, we are able to better prioritize what features we need to include and where we can differentiate ourselves.
Findings
The competitive analysis revealed that there were two features that all other competitors had and Flowductive needed to implement. These two features were to do lists and progress tracking. We also found that no platform offered all of the features we analyzed so we there was an opportunity to fill that gap.
Green= Feature Great, Yellow= Feature okay, Red= feature poor or non existent
Method 02: Interviews
Discovery
Analysis
After we transcribed the interviews, we analyzed the findings by grouping similar themes together to create an affinity map. This analysis allowed us to find emerging patterns across the interviews. Once we had done the synthesis, we turned the data into digestible insights to present to the team.
Findings
Our interviews revealed many relevant and useful findings that helped us better understand our potential users. We were able to present the team with three actionable insights that offered both design recommendations and further research questions to explore.
Sharing progress with others helps create accountability and makes them feel supported
Planning and organization helps people be more productive and feel accomplished when they
People use many different tools that help them address different needs when it comes to being productive.
We continued doing discovery research by conducted 3 in depth remote interviews. The interviews took place over one week with both an interviewer and notetaker present. We wanted to better understand how people felt about managing their time and what their pain points and motivations were for using tools to help with productivity.
Next Steps
Research Impact
I presented the findings with an overview and key points to the founder and team. We came away with four product recommendations and four areas for further research. One of the key findings offered direction on which product features to work on next. This finding was also further supported by the competitive analysis. Currently, two of the design recommendations are in development to undergo usability testing.
01 Usability Testing
Users reported the feedback option as the most useful feature during concept testing. I’d like to be able to see design build this feature out and test it with users.
Reflection
🔑 Participant Recruitment
⚖️ Stakeholder Meetings
Unfortunately we didn’t include the stakeholders in our meetings as much as we should have and in the future I would make sure to have a project kickoff meeting and continually checkin.
02 Further Research
A user flow we didn’t get to address was how users could find and connect with collaborators. I would like to continue doing discovery work on how artists form successful collaborations.
The biggest obstacle in this project was participant recruitment. The lack of budget and poor screener survey led to a small pool of participants and less qualified candidates. Next time, I will add open answer questions to the screener survey to make sure we are getting the appropriate participants.