How to make a discovery abroad
By: Nina Vasconcelos Simões
Tags: Product Design, Technology, Research, UX, Discovery

Pre-Discovery

The level of anxiety at this particular step is high. Well, before starting packing, it is important that we plan and understand, very clearly, everything that is involved in a discovery process.

🎯 Set your target

Primarily, we must have a clear aim. What do I need in order to draw this new experience? The key here is to understand the complete journey from our users that book classes trough Gympass. Their motivations, behavior and goals.

📈 Analyzing data and establishing hypotheses

Gympass is a global product, so why US? Culturally speaking, people in the US tend to pre-book multiple services. This is a rooted habit among the US population, moreover, most of the bookings made through our app comes from US.

We have also noted that 80% of our users used to make their bookings through the gym’s page. Why?

Another study showed us that a lot of users used to go to their profile so they could check out the latest classes they have been to. Why?

All those assessments lead us to consider a few hypotheses to better structure our research guide.

🔎 Stakeholders Research

A lot of issues our users face have been already registered by our CX department. Besides that, it is also important to understand which other departments may interfere in our research. All departments involved within the company should have an active voice at a discovery process. That said, we interviewed key-people from different departments and gathered other information that also contributed to our research guide structure.

📝 Structuring Our Research Guide

With our hypotheses and objectives clear, now it’s time to organize our script. A framework I really enjoy using is the CSD matrix. With that, we are able to organize all the information gathered as certainties, assumptions, and doubts. In that way, we are able to know exactly what we are investigating next. A tip would be to create this matrix with the help of the interviewed stakeholders. Besides gathering a much richer result, you will also make people who participated in the discovery process feel important as well as they are really a part of it. Here at Gympass we have a Design Ops area. Bruna Maia, our team researcher, gave me a lot of support during this whole phase. We decided to make two focus groups, with two different profiles: those who booked classes through the app, and those who did not have that habit. Our script was built in 5 parts: questions about using our app in general; questions about booking habits (not only at Gympass, but other platforms too) and which platform would then be used as a reference to it; dynamics to build the ideal booking journey; “picture that…” dynamics, where hypothetical scenarios would be given and people would tell us what each part, them, as users, Gympass, and Gyms should do; along with a design critique with a few screen drafts I took with me. At the end, we asked them to rate the current booking process and give us a general overview on what they thought about it.

📆 Plan Your Agenda

We planned the whole discovery process to happen in six days. Our focus groups would happen in two days. What about the others? Structuring the research schedule with users is essential, but we must remember that this is only part of the whole discovery process. Our purpose was to personally experience the american routine, culture and habits of those who used to book our services. You know, the old “put yourself in someone’s shoes”. With that in mind, our agenda was divided in two moments: Focus Group with users, and trying out other booking services. Planning your agenda ahead is very important, even for you to show the stakeholders what exactly is being done and justify your time abroad.