Pet Pals
The best for your pet, at your fingertips
Customer Research Market Research Opportunity Areas Service concepts Concept Testing Customer Value Proposition Product Roadmap Presenting to C-Suite
Activities involved
Who’s the client
Leading Australian Pet Company
What
App Design
My role
Strategist, Designer, Researcher
Category
Products, eCommerce, Service
Teamed up with
Product Manager, Strategist, Jr Designer
When
Feb - April 2023
The Opportunity
Our client’s main competitor had just released an app, which created urgency for our client to explore their own app.
What did we do?
Key Learnings & Reflection
During exploratory customer research, the client wanted to conduct research through customer focus groups. I advocated strongly for customer interviews as an alternative, as they help to produce a less biased result during exploratory research.
However, after a week of discussion, the conversation was going nowhere, and making the argument for customer interviews was pulling away a lot of my energy from doing the actual research work. When I described my frustrations to a colleague, it became clear that it was time to accept the decision of customer focus groups and move on. I shifted my energy away from “we should do customer interviews instead” towards “how might we better design customer focus group questions to make the most out of it?” In the end, our research insight was enough to inform our decision.
I learned that working with time/ budget/ scope restrictions, we won’t always be able to select the best research method. Although not ideal, any research is better than no research, and maximising what we have access to can help create better customer outcomes.
