Delivering A Data-driven Client project
In Hyper Island, a study program is broken down to modules, and in some modules, we get to do a client project. In this article, I’d like to share my group’s methodology on delivering our first client project.
Client project can be fun, it could also be challenging. There are a lot of factors involved including group dynamics, client requirement, and getting access to client data. For our first project, we partnered with KitchenLab, a Sweden-based e-commerce for kitchen equipment. The task was this:
“How might we increase conversion on kitchenlab.se with the help of improved UX?”
As a new student doing my first client project, it took a bit of time for me to really understand how we should proceed. To make it a bit more challenging, we didn’t get the access to client data on day 1, so we spent some time to analyze the competitors, until we reached a wall that can only be torn down by getting access to client data.
Group dynamics also played a big part in this project. Since we’re quite new and the group was randomly distributed, I needed time to adjust with my 4 teammates, and evidently, they also needed to. In the introduction weeks of school, we were introduced to this Integrated Model of Group Development (IMGD) and for me, it was quite obvious that we were on stage 1.
How to overcome this and move on to the next stage? Enter Team Development Session (TDS)! Honestly, I didn’t really know what to expect from a TDS, but I came in to the session with an open perspective and was ready to open up to my teammates. In the session, we were encouraged to share our needs and give feedback to one-another. Fortunately, my teammates also opened up, and from that moment I felt that the group dynamic started to get better and better.
Furthermore, we finally got access to KitchenLab’s Google Analytics and Hotjar. This enabled us to explore the data. During this time, we hadn’t learned about SQL nor Python, so we relied heavily on the available tools, particularly Google Analytics.
Another ray of hope shone when a guest lecturer from Google (formerly Spotify) shared about a framework that is coined by Annina Koskinen, Lead Product Designer at Spotify, called Thoughtful Execution Framework (TEF).
Since I have experience in innovation coaching, this came quite natural to me. The goal is the client brief, and the data & insights came from Google Analytics, Hotjar, and competitor analysis. To strengthen our data, I proposed something that I had previously done at work, which is called usability testing. This means that we were to interview 2 people each and ask them to complete a task on KitchenLab’s website without any direction, to see if they encounter any challenges. The group accepted my proposal and we set out to interview 10 people.
From all this insights, we wanted to come up with problems/opportunities to proceed with. I proposed to the group to do brainwriting (writing ideas silently) so that everyone can be heard and the group agreed, so we came up with some problems/opportunities and discussed it further. Using TEF, we had to prioritize which ones we would like to dig deeper. This was done through discussion and dotmocracy, and came to an agreement to proceed with low-hanging fruit solutions.
From the selected problems/opportunities, we did something similar again, only this time with hypotheses, and afterwards with solutions. During the solution phase, each of us sketched the desired website layout that we believe would increase conversion.
In the end, we came up with a solution to increase the cohesiveness between home page, product page, and blog, so that customers are served with popular products and get educated on how to best utilize those products, while also improving the newsletter feature to be more attractive.
To make the solution visual, we decided to use Figma. Since my teammate Pat and I had experience in prototyping, both of us took that task, while the rest were focusing on the presentation slides. You could find our Figma prototype here.
On presentation day, each group presented their solution. It was impressive to hear all different solutions that each group came up with. The client seemed pleased and who knows, maybe they’ll pick one or a few solutions to implement themselves.
Cheers from team 6!
