User Research on Behavioural Change
OurPath is a unique ‘tech for good’ startup for pre-diabetic people. I was requested to flesh out their personas and evaluate their concept model with their users.
Understand:
I worked closely with the CEO’s to learn their mentor based concept, the persona already created and read existing research on pre-diabetic patients to familiarise myself with the user.
Much of OurPath’s initial concepts and primary persona appeared valid. OurPath can aid the user’s decision-making process on habit formation (eating, exercising, socialising) by providing accurate and open information on pre-diabetes. OurPath's mentor model is three months based.
Design and Evaluation:
I then designed a set of semi-structured phone interviews. Funnelling from open to closed questions, to validate previous assumptions. Like this, I gained a better understanding of the user’s experience and their behavioural change triggers; their emotions and challenges when they when diagnosed as pre-diabetic.
Evaluation:
I gathered data from observation notes and voice recordings. Following that, I analysed the date gathered in themes of patterns including both the CEO and CTO throughout the UCD process to engage them.
Tasks
- Organised and facilitated phone interviews
- Data gathering and thematic analysis user research report
- Findings and next steps presentation
Results & Deliverables:
Within five working days, OurPath collaboratively reached the first proof of concept, validated personas and inferred new insights on their proposed model.
To help OurPath with their next steps in user experience research, I recommended they followed an ethnographic study to understand the users’ transient mood and its role in a 12-week diet model for pre-diabetic people.
