Kmart

What was done:

Project kick-off workshop
10 x 60minute remote 1:1 interviews with Kmart customers
Synthesis of key insights and delivery of recommendations
Final showcase presentation

Time:

3 weeks

Tools:

Trello
Mural
Zoom
Miro

Kmart, a national retailer, wanted to identify where and the kinds of personalisation initiatives on their website that will be of most value to their customers.

My role as a UX researcher was to help the organisation understand the customer needs and expectations around an online experience that felt tailored to them and to map this out to identify opportunity areas. I worked alongside a principal designer during this project.

A detailed customer journey map was delivered to influence internal conversations around personalisation and inspire future decision-making.

The challenge

Personalisation. We can probably define it pretty well and we can probably all come up with a few examples of good personalisation such as product suggestions and tailored content (think Amazon and Netflix). We also know that when done well, personalisation feels unobtrusive and intuitive. In other words, it just kind of....works.

This proved challenging when it came to creating a discussion guide that would prompt participants to talk about their experiences. After all how do you talk about something that people are not supposed to notice?

"how do you talk about something that people are not supposed to notice?"

Research strategy - unpacking personalisation

How do you talk about personalisation, without talking about personalisation?

I started by breaking down the concept of personalisation and asking myself, what - at its heart - is personalisation? Working with my UX principle we came up with some ideas of what personsalisation is.

There is a fine line between personalised content or services and pushy spam and advertising. And that distinction came down to whether the content being suggested is useful for the customer or not. Another important distinction to make is between personalisation (something that is done by the system) and customisation (involving customer effort or input).

Therefore personalisation can be distilled into 'usefulness' and 'effortless'.

"Personalisation can be distilled into 'usefulness' and 'effortlessness'"

Articulating research objectives

It was important to understand upfront what we needed to uncover in the context of this project and let that be our north star.

In a 90 minute kick-off workshop with stakeholders, we identified the organisation's goals and objectives and how this applied to the current project.

Personalisation efforts could only be built upon robust customer data. Therefore one of the research objectives was to understand customers' mental models around data sharing and collection in the context of personalisation efforts.

"Personalisation efforts could only be built upon robust customer data. Therefore one of the objectives was to understand customers' mental models around data sharing and collection."

Crafting a good research approach

Starting broad, I wanted to chat with participants about their general online shopping experiences. I wanted the participants to start thinking - and talking - about experiences and moments that felt it was 'tailored' and 'just what they needed' and 'useful'. This part was quite broad and unstructured - I wanted the participants to lead me down a path for me to explore further.

I also asked participants to tell me times when they were shown information or products that were not useful at all. After all, sometimes it is easier to talk about an annoyance or a negative experience than to think of positive ones.

I then dug deeper to understand participants' experiences in the Kmart context. In particular, I wanted to know what their interactions with Kmart were like in terms of shopping online. What were they doing and why were they doing it? From here I ventured further to understand times, when they felt like something they saw online, was useful or not.

n = 10

High level research findings

Organisations need to ask whether personalisation efforts are going to be useful for the customer. If it is not user-led then personalisation will not likely succeed.

Effective personalisation is built on the foundations of robust customer data. Organisations need to ask themselves if they understand customers adequately to use personalisation effectively. Otherwise, a blanket approach will result in customers feeling like they're being spammed.

It is important to distinguish complementary products from similar products and know when to recommend each type of product.

Customers' online behavior can also influence the type of personalisation being deployed. For example, browsing behaviour may warrant being shown a mix of complementary and similar products. On the other hand, targeted navigation behaviour may warrant the customer being shown similar products instead.

A full report of the detailed findings with recommendations was delivered after the project.

"Organisations need to ask themselves if they understand customers adequately to use personalisation effectively"

Mapping out the customer journey

It was apparent from the research that there were two segments of customers - the focussed shopper and the browsing shopper. While the needs are generally different, there were also overlaps that were important to call out.

For each customer pain point, opportunities for personalisation were identified and prioritised as 'high' 'medium' or 'low'. The opportunities for personalisation refer to both customer needs and pain points.

In a workshop with the stakeholders, the research was played back and the journey map was presented. Through discussions, the stakeholders 'voted' on pain points and needs that were priority areas for the organisation to focus on.

Impact of the project

The project provided a way for internal stakeholders within the organisation to understand opportunity areas when it came to personalisation so that future road maps could be developed. The customer journey map provided a tangible artifact from which the organisation could have further discussion about how to align their systems and technology to better utilise the data they have for their personalisation efforts.

Reflection

I enjoyed this project because there was an opportunity to demonstrate how important design research is to stakeholders and take them on a journey, as well as the chance to explore a meaty topic such as personalisation.

It was challenging and rewarding to think through and craft a research strategy and approach to tackle a very abstract concept.

It was particularly gratifying to translate the research insights into a consumable artefact to orient the stakeholders and provide them with a starting point to their personalisation efforts.