Service discovery
Understanding the user journeys of Globo's purchase experience
Design team
Antonio Duarte (UX Researcher)
My role
Planning; Interviews; Desk research; Service Blueprint; Analysis; Documentation
Client
Globo
Year
2021
The problem and context
Globo is improving its digital products and the D2C operation is becoming more complex then ever. The product team wanted to understand about consumer behavior in the purchase experience and needed an action plan to start measuring user experience.
Globo's sales platform operates in different sales channels, such as web, mobile app (iOS and Android) and TV.
Methodology
My challenge was to first get a view about the big picture and then start understanding specific scenarios. That's why I planned the following steps for the project:
• Interviews with stakeholders
• Desk research about user flows and product interfaces
• Desk research about past qualitative and quantitative data
• Service blueprint and journeys analysis
• Action plan delivery
For this project I noticed that documentation would be a key point. To organize the whole process I used Notion as a "project diary" and Miro and Figma to make it more visual the service blueprint and other journey's analysis.
Interview with stakeholders
I scheduled an 1 hour remote interview with 2 PMs, 7 POs and 2 Product Design Leads to understand the topics below:
• Team structure: squad goal, team size, stakeholders
• Daily work routine: main tasks, meetings and rituals
• Decision making: how do they help to prioritize and develop the product backlog
• User knowledge level: how user-centric they were
• Expectations with this Service Discovery: how they expected my work would be useful for them
"We want to know what paths our user make to purchase a product with us and their pain points in every journey"
In general, everybody wanted to have a clear understanding about what users are dealing with the checkout experience.
After the interviews I created a visual work flow to see the big picture of how everybody were related. The red, orange and green highlights represented how user-centric each professional were.
The PMs were more concern about business decisions (red and orange) and the POs were more likely to put user needs up front in their priority rule. Since the scale wasn't well balanced, it was clear that putting user in the center would affect the work culture between the teams.
The principal journeys they wanted to map was:
• First purchase (when a person subscribe for the first time a Globo product)
• Second purchase (when a client subscribe another product)
• Upgrade (when a client improve a product's service, paying for more features)
Desk research: user flows, product interfaces, qualitative and quantitative data
After meeting every important actor who make decisions behind the product, it was time to dig deep in the checkout experience.
I was also able to understand how every Globo's digital product is sold, creating this relationship map and validating with the PM responsible for sales operation:
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Sales channel: web journey (desktop)
Sales channel: in-app journey (smartphone and TV)
I started to document standard journeys and create this visual flow to allow me to see the interfaces and point out key experience points, business rules and possible pain points.
To validate my thoughts I paired with the product design team.
Qualitative data
The product design team also helped sourcing me all past user research, which some of it I have personally worked on as well.
What it was already known about user behavior:
• People struggle to understand the upgrade experience in the landing page
• The differences between subscribing in the web or in-app generates a few frictions in user experience. For example, if a in-app subscriber wants to upgrade the service using the web platform they can't proceed.
• The products offered 2 different payment frequency: monthly and annual. People who choose monthly justify that is to test the service and who choose annual wants to save money
• The "Globo"brand make people to feel safe inputing their data in the checkout
Quantitative data
I paired with the POs* to have access to dashboards and the Sales Force reports. At this point I understood what kind of quantitative data the team was collecting and might be useful to complement the user behavior.
• Abandoned cart at the checkout
• Customer service indicators: top client's complains
• Google Analytics events: usability tracking
*the team didn't have a Data Science person to help with the analysis
Comparing journeys and finding pain points
Well, after gathering a huge amount of material and finally understanding the complexity about each user journey and sales channel, I again create another visual map to point out experience issues and frictions.
To illustrate the possible user mood and facilitate the map communication, I used emojis.
😃: satisfied
😐: neutral
🤨: confused
😡: frustrated
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It was clear that the PMs were prioritizing features on the web sales channel and putting user needs aside on the in-app sales channel.
Users were forced to go to the web but some business rules blocked in-app clients in some scenarios. So the business numbers for the web experience were good, but that didn't mean the experience was also pleasent.
Adapted Service Blueprint
To put together this whole discovery process and validate with the stakeholders if my understanding about the purchase experience, I decided to present the material with an adapted blueprint.
I didn't actually represented every step of the user journey because there was several journeys. The team had the expectation to build and action plan to start studying user behavior, so I focused in presenting pillars of the main purchase journey, that might be detailed when needed in the future.
The main pillars that guided every user journey were:
Discover a product
via landing page, social media, the product and other sales touchpoint
Authenticate
login or create an account
Pay
input payment data
Consume
use the service
Manage
manage the subscrption
Service Blueprint
Action Plan: the solution
The PMs weren't so happy to see my work, but I was always trying to tell that the analysis was about user behavior and not about finding a stakeholder to blame.
That was when I proposed the action plan and deliver a solution to help the team start studying their users and become more "user-centric".
Start from the beginning
I suggested to the first purchase journey as an MVP. It was important to run a work flow, learn from it and then escalate the research operation throughout the other journeys.
My plan was to start monitoring different points of the journey, and analyze the feedbacks every month. It followed the steps:
• Survey to collect user's perception about the landing page
• Use a transactional indicator to collect user's perception about the payment process, using SEQ (single ease question). The indicator would be about three tasks: creating account, inputing payment data and the overall flow.
• Use Hotjar to analyze heatmaps and clicks behavior
• Use Appbot to analyze comments in the iOS and Android stores.
Learnings
This project is still a work in progress and soon I'll be ready to share results about the action plan. For now, all I can say it was an intense experience to dig deep inside a team culture and understand how it was affecting the product solution.
In every touchpoint I had with the stakeholders I noticed little by little they were becoming more empathetic with their users and sharing more valuable informations with me, that helped me to move on.