Generative research to uncover what students and bootcampers need
company
My Role
Lead UX Researcher
Team Facilitator
Team
3 UX Designers
Co-founder & CEO
Timeline
10 weeks, 2024
Project Overview
Impact
By challenging the company's unvalidated assumptions, I identified a new customer group whose needs closely overlapped with students', letting the company expand its reach through marketing alone rather than building separate features.
The company shipped the redesigned beta app within 12 months of the research findings, based on the direction my team and I recommended for serving the new target audience.
My Approach
The Learners' CEO presented the following assumption to my team:
My team initially agreed that students were a strong target audience, since valuable resources tend to spread quickly among peers with similar career interests.
However, I challenged the assumption that students had the greatest need, since they already have access to school-based resources like professors and alumni. I proposed testing another hypothesis: that UX bootcamp participants, who are transitioning into UX but can't fully commit to formal education, have an equally strong need for a resource like Learners.
I recommended including bootcampers in the study because they:
Represent a large, well-networked group at a similar career stage to students
Could expand the user base with minimal additional effort, if their needs aligned with students'
The CEO and team agreed, and we added bootcampers to the research scope.
Research Questions
How might we effectively support students and bootcamp participants who aspire to work in the UX industry?
To answer the main question, we prioritized addressing the following sub-questions:
What are the learning needs and interests of students and bootcamp participants?
What features will motivate them to download the app?
How are they currently learning to grow as a UX professional?
My Role
Lead UX Researcher
As the team's most experienced researcher, I led:
- Research plan development and bootcamp participant recruiting
- 8 of the 11 moderated interviews
- Survey design and user journey mapping
- Coaching teammates through their first interviews
- Synthesis of findings and the final presentation
Team facilitator
- Prepared meeting agendas
- Moderated weekly meetings with Learners' CEO and our mentor
- Took notes for the team
Procedure
Weekly CEO Interviews
Proposed weekly check-ins to get first-hand insight into company priorities and prior research
Competitive Analysis
Identified Learners' strengths/weaknesses vs. competitors UX students use
Found services target users want but competitors don't offer
11 Moderated User Interviews
6 students (HCI/HCDE) to understand needs and the reasoning behind them
4 bootcamp participants, recruited via UX networking events
1 UX professional (portfolio reviewer) to validate findings via a third party
Survey: 151 Entries
Quantified interview insights and validated findings across students and bootcampers
Deliverables
Competitive Analysis
Survey Analysis
User Journey Maps
Application Preview
Results & Impact
[ Takeaways from Interviewing the CEO ]
The company’s primary focus is on providing free, scalable services to users.
User engagement, measured by frequency of use and time spent on the product, is a key performance indicator (KPI) for the company.
Based on these priorities, I worked with my team to develop recommendations that align with the company's goals.
[ Competitive Analysis Findings ]
Learners' Strengths:
The company has a strong network of UX professionals who deeply value the brand, as demonstrated by their involvement in conferences.
Learners' Weaknesses:
The company lacks strong brand recognition among students.
The features and content offered do not align with the needs or preferences of the student audience.
High-quality content on the app and YouTube is not easily searchable or optimized for quick consumption on mobile devices.
Learners' 100+ videos were organized into just two playlists, with many of them being over 30 minutes long. This made it difficult for users to find content by topic and watch on mobile.
Users can't search for specific questions and must scroll through the list to find what they're curious about.
I focused on strategies that build on the company's strengths while addressing its weaknesses.
[ Insights on Target Users and Key Recommendations ]
Pain Point 1
Students hesitate to reach out to UX professionals
Pain Point 2
UX professionals often do not respond to cold messages
Many struggled with creating a UX portfolio.
Pain Point 3
Users are unsure how to apply general tips to their case studies
Pain Point 4
Users receive inconsistent feedback from different mentors
The insights have guided the direction for the mobile application redesign, highlighting specific features to target in the coming years.
After the final presentation, the CEO mentioned that offering public portfolio reviews was a scalable feature his team hadn’t expected students to want, but they would like to prioritize it in the new app.
I identified a new group of target users—bootcamp participants—with similar needs, enabling the company to expand its potential user base with minimal cost and effort.
Plan ahead to prevent AI from manipulating survey results
Offering a monetary incentive and posting the survey publicly on LinkedIn attracted hundreds of AI bot responses from fake accounts. I addressed this by adding reCAPTCHA and validation questions, randomizing the question order, and manually removing the bot responses. Next time, I'll build these safeguards in from the start rather than reacting after the fact.
Become a domain expert to give recommendations that stakeholders find helpful
Our secondary research didn't go deep enough into the EdTech domain from the perspective of a stakeholder who is an expert in the field. A stronger grasp of the industry would have produced more valuable insights and built more trust with stakeholders. Moving forward, I'll prioritize becoming a domain expert early in the process.