Research, Part 1

Over the past two courses in my Master's program, I've had the chance to learn and practice varying research methods for digital product design. As much as I have naturally enjoyed designing websites according to visual design principles, I have been surprised by how much more I have taken an interest in how to conduct research that will inform a product's design properly. For this week, I will focus on sharing my experience with the first course of the two I took: Research 1

Research 1 emphasized collaboration and teamwork. A group of around four of us came together to brainstorm the best means of researching customer feedback to present some stakeholder recommendations for a concept product's design.

The Scenario

Several key business goals from senior executive positions were presented to the team to account for in the project. The team was tasked with creating a research plan to help identify the current noteworthy obstacles to achieving those business goals. It was an excellent opportunity to practice the soft skill of being firm in letting stakeholders know what would and would not be feasible to address within our team's research project. We had to choose the most attainable goals and incorporate them into our research plan. Below are the business goals we decided to prioritize for the project based on the consensus of stakeholder needs.

- Increase loyalty program enrollment by understanding why customers enroll (or decline enrollment) during the reservation flow.

- Increase business traveler reservations by identifying business travelers' needs and wants from the hotel properties – including differentiation between customer wants vs. their actual needs.

- Understand what leisure travelers look for, want, and need when booking a hotel room

The Process

Upon approval of our research plan, we began conducting the research. For this project, we focused mainly on qualitative methods by interviewing potential customers in a mixture of remote and in-person settings. These participants (8 in total) were selected based on their ability to offer diverse perspectives through a unique career, stage of life, use of technology, or similar. We sought our best to include a diverse demographic to reflect the immense diversity of the Marriott customer base.

We largely framed all our questions for the participants in a generative approach, meaning the questions were open-ended, reflective, and exploratory to gain a true sense of each participant's experience with booking hotels online. For example, instead of asking, "Do you like to book hotel rooms online? Yes or No?" we would likely ask something like, "What do you look for in a customer loyalty program?"

The feedback was honestly enlightening and, sometimes, even surprising! It demonstrated that a person could not assume you know what the customers think about your products. For example, I didn't realize how much people judge a hotel based on photos and their quality for showing a room they are booking. Even if the room was clean, if it looked outdated or old, people felt they might have a bad experience booking due to either lack of cleanliness or safety.

Once we had brought together all the feedback and distilled the experiences into a series of singular statements, we sorted them into groups into an affinity diagram so that we could spot the main trends we saw in their insights. What we found was quite clear and consistent.

“Although meetings can feel like time-wasters, if done right, investing in collaboration and dialogue can change the entire trajectory of a project from useless to innovative.”

Customers would generally accept or decline enrollment during the reservation flow based on whether they knew they would A) be saving more money, B) receive monetary perks or C) have an easy sign-up experience. Customers who were traveling for business usually determined what hotel and room to book primarily based on the amenities in the room, the cleanliness of the room, and the online availability to book the room. Although customers traveling for leisure also chose rooms to book based on cleanliness and amenities, they showed a considerable desire for rooms that specifically offered a sizable kitchen and proximity to their travel destination in this scenario.

Results and Recommendations

Based on these findings, we made the following recommendations to the stakeholders.

To increase loyalty enrollment, promotional material and sign-up information would need to highlight that customers who sign up for rewards would save more money than if they went through a short-term homestay alternative (which is wildly popular right now). Information for the rewards program would need to showcase a variety of incentives and perks of monetary value for signing up (such as complimentary breakfast, rooms, and discounts). Lastly, the sign-up process for the rewards program needed to be quick, simple, and straightforward. Based on specific user feedback, the user workflow for signing up should only involve asking what is necessary to get started. Locating the sign-up portal should be easy to identify as well.

For meeting business traveler needs, the online booking workflow would need to offer a filtering option if the nature of the trip is business related. With this filter applied, the various stay options could clearly show appropriate amenities for that type of stay. Perhaps most importantly, the images of every room to book would need to depict a reliable representation of what the rooms look like in their cleanest form. Older images would need to be vigilantly and regularly removed so that nothing would appear dated at any point.

Finally, to satisfy leisure travelers, ample tools and resources should be given for customers to view their booking options based on proximity to notable landmarks and destinations. Map tools would be an excellent option to consider for something like this. In the same way, as mentioned earlier, the booking process must also include a search filter for if the nature of the trip is leisure related, and the images for these types of rooms must be constantly updated with clean photos. However, in this case, it is essential that the images for these rooms showcase kitchen pictures most of all.

Lessons Learned

Unfortunately, the course length did not allow us to take the project from the research to the design phase, but the experience was certainly worthwhile.

The most valuable lesson I learned from this course is that it is vital to be a team player. It can be easy to let someone else who is passionate about the work take over and do more work than is wise for them to do. Conversely, it can be easy to want control of the project and do too much yourself. In both cases, the quality of the work is diminished, and people's unique talents and perspectives are sidelined, not to mention much more time gets wasted. Although meetings can feel like time-wasters, if done right, investing in collaboration and dialogue can change the entire trajectory of a project from useless to innovative.

Like I said at the start, this class was so much fun! The second course, although different in structure, was just as fun, mainly because of the creative freedom allowed for that project. But to hear more on that, you will have to wait to read about it in the next post. Stay tuned!