Experience Haus community research
📅 2021
✏️ User research, UX design, insights analysis
👥 2 UX designers
Case and Brief
Experience Haus is a course provider
training individuals and organisations in the fields of digital product design and strategy. They pride themselves on offering high quality content that is not prerecorded, real projects on live briefs from real companies, and lifelong mentorship to only small groups of students at a time. An interview with Haus’ founder to start off the research immediately provided valuable insights: in line with the values of the school,
Haus want to build their community onto the Circle platform, and this research aims to provide guidance on how to develop that space.
Alongside the course content, Haus engage with their students via Slack, but they now need a better way to organise their offer around the needs of their ever growing community.
The Challenge
Interrogating the brief and interviewing Experience Haus’ founder immediately revealed the 4 main objectives of this research project:
Viability_ To prove there is in fact an interested audience, so that there is viability for a standalone Haus community platform
Content desired_ To research what the audience is interested in seeing and to define the offering
Price_ To explore pricing options in relation to what the audience is willing to spend
Content categories_ To shortlist some of the content and events/meetups that EH could provide to their audience
The final output of this user research project is very much a concept, a plan of action.
Not only some of the services offered by Haus were confirmed as successful and interesting to their audience; our research also provided 4 key insights addressing:
the beginners among the Haus students & alumni;
their job hunting needs;
the relationship between the students and their tutors & mentors;
the marketing activities promoting Haus as a course provider.
To shape the new community platform:
we ideated around new content to be provided on- and offline;
I proposed a breakdown of how this content could be hosted in the Spaces provided by the platform Circle.
RESEARCH
We started off recruiting interviewees: thanks to personal connections, we were able to recruit from both Haus and not-Haus students&alumni, so we could also gain insights on the competitors.
UX Design, UI Design and Product Strategy course providers - competitors matrix
We interviewed 9 participants:
6 with some design background
3 new to the field
EH & not-EH students or alumni
With some help from my colleague, I put together a interview script of 20 questions to explore:
The participants’ career path
Their journey finding and selecting a course
Their experience with the course provider
The people they’ve met in the course
Networking & events
What content they will like to see in their ideal community
I personally conducted most of the interviews, each lasting around 30-40 minutes, and went back to replay the recordings to dissect their answers. The emerging themes are featured in the following affinity map I created.
Because Haus already knows very well their audience and the sub-groups in which the community articulates itself in, for the sole purpose of this research I crafted two very synthetic personas, to summarise their specific need of community:
Omar
29yo - Graphic designer
Thanks to his design background, he thinks he can transition into product design through UI design.
HE NEEDS people to collaborate with on portfolio-relevant projects.
PAINPOINTS: He currently works in a company that won’t value his new skills, so he needs to move quickly.
[Grabstar .io on Unsplash]
Kristina
41yo - Buyer & Merchandiser
She wants a more creative job that’s still data driven, but doesn’t know in which direction to move.
SHE NEEDS a mentor who can advise her on her contribution in the UX design field.
PAINPOINTS: She left her job to join a course and wants to re-employ.
[Amy Hirschi on Unsplash]
Insights
Some of the answers we collected confirmed that Haus’ core values and offering are well perceived and desired by their audience:
“I have a goal, a real project, so I’m immediately putting to use what I’m learning.”
“I like a team environment with activities you partake, physically interacting with other people.”
“Really great to have a job board on EH Slack, stuff I wouldn’t come across on The Dots or Linkedin.”
I then uncovered four key smart insights:
1. BEGINNERS DON'T GET INVOLVED BECAUSE THEY DON'T FEEL CONFIDENT IN THEIR KNOWLEDGE
2. NEW KNOWLEDGE NEEDS TO BE RELEVANT TO THE JOB AND GIVE INSIGHTS ON HOW THE INDUSTRY WORKS
3. DEVELOPING A CONNECTION WITH PEERS & TUTORS MEANS GETTING TO PERSONALLY KNOW EACH OTHER
4. TO SUCCESSFULLY ONBOARD NEW STUDENTS, THE PERSONAL TOUCH CAN ONLY COME AFTER TARGETED ADS
I conducted an audit on Haus content and identified what was performing well in comparison to the users’ needs.
Solution
Thanks to all insights uncovered I was able to answer the key questions of the brief. I explored a potential solution and made some suggestions on how we could use it.
What the learning community wants from their course provider can be summarized as follows:
Given that Circle can be organized in “spaces” and “groups of spaces”, I then shuffled those topics to fit these spaces and to group the offering in 3 separate tiers (perspective students, alumni and paying professionals).
Next steps
I concluded the research phase proposing the next steps of action, towards the implementation of the Haus’ community on Circle: in the Summer of 2021, Haus already started crafting new event formats and planning new content (from readable resources to interactive workshops), and have already scaled up their team to help on this and on an effective social & marketing strategy.
There is already a conversation going on to set up some Spaces up in Circle for a restricted sample of the community: this will probably allow to start testing in October 2021… updates coming soon!
My takeaways
I was selected by the school, among some 40 interested alumni to work on this research project, shortly after I finished an Experience Haus course myself.
Because this project is specifically focused on discovery, and I only had one other team mate, I had the chance to really lead the study and interview all participants.
Over the course of the research sessions, I have found myself adjusting the script on the spot as I went along: some questions weren’t giving insightful results, and the conversations sparked new questions worth asking.
I also had a difficult participant that required more time than usual and I had to 'think on my feet' to quickly rephrase the question and change the direction of our conversation.