A Design Blueprint
Using UX strategy to craft a user-centred approach to membership
Photo by Daria Nepriakhina on Unsplash.
Project Overview
The Problem
The CBC, with its large range of content-driven products, has a wide audience with different interests and needs. We needed to find a way to identify what those audience needs are and how to apply that knowledge across the CBC.
However, many of the discussions centred on possible features and not on user needs. We had to find a way to bring more awareness of the user experience of membership while balancing technical feasibility and business constraints.
The Solution
To design a membership blueprint that would focus on what a user would expect and need from membership in order to sign up and illustrate the complexity of creating such an experience.
The Tools
Airtable, Google Slides, Milanote, and Miro
My Role
Team Lead, UX Strategist, Workshop Facilitator, and UX Researcher
The Team
Two Product Designers, a Content Designer, and a UX Researcher
UX Research
Comparative Analysis
Comparative analysis of membership experiences using Airtable.
Our first step was to do a comparative analysis. We wanted to get an understanding of the types of membership experiences available in the market.
We looked at a variety of organizations and platforms to see what each of the different membership experiences looked like.
Key insight
We discovered that there were 5 main membership models. Each model offered something valuable to their members, depending on what their needs and motivations were.
Membership Playbook
After unpacking our findings from the comparative analysis, we needed a way to communicate this work in a clear and engaging way to others in the organization.
To do that, we decided to create a CBC membership playbook that we used as the basis for our talk with various teams. By creating a deck, we were able to provide a tangible artefact for teams to reference whenever they needed to.
Our goal was to help start a conversation about what membership could look like.
User Personas
After presenting the playbook, we worked with the product designers who were embedded on teams to create proto-personas for each of their products.
These personas were used to help each team think about membership from their users’ perspectives.
We decided that proto-personas would be best because not every team had UX research available at the time for their product. Instead, we made it clear that these personas would be based on team assumptions that could be validated with research later on.
Membership Journey Maps
Boards from the journey mapping workshops.
Using Miro, we designed a journey mapping workshop for each product team, using the personas they created. The workshops were specifically tailored for our remote work environment.
Without specific value propositions for membership, the teams used their personas to help them understand what their users might value in this experience.
Key Insights
A lot of great discussions arose from these workshops because team members had different opinions about what the personas would actually do. These disagreements were a good starting point for the kinds of questions we would want to uncover in our UX research.
Having to run all of these workshops remotely posed different challenges than running workshops in-person. We needed to do lot more preparation ahead of time to make sure that we didn’t waste time explaining the mechanics of the tool. It was also important to give every participant space to quietly contribute because not everyone was comfortable speaking out and we wanted to make sure everyone was engaged.
User Interviews
The journey maps gave each team a basis for building empathy for their users, but we knew we needed to validate the assumptions in the maps.
We decided to focus on one product team, and we chose Listen (the radio and podcast product) because it offered the chance to look at both desktop and mobile app experiences.
With Listen’s UX researcher, we began validating the assumptions through a series of user interviews.
Interview notes and analysis.
Key Insights
We began with one persona but we discovered there were actually 6 different ones.
In 70% of the interviews, people expressed strong positive feelings about CBC’s public mandate which is to “inform, enlighten and entertain.”
Several participants expressed concern about the possibility of content paywalls. Some said they would rather pay more taxes instead.
DESIGN
Design Blueprint
The blueprint working draft.
Using the analysis from the interviews, we laid out the steps someone would take through a possible membership journey in Listen.
We divided the steps into stages of engagement, beginning with possible membership all the way to advocacy. Then we began plotting key moments in the journey.
Once we finished designing the structure, we began gathering input from other members of the Listen team, including developers and product managers.
We then met with people from analytics, personalization, search, and strategy to get a fuller picture of the system that would be needed to support this experience.
NEXT STEPS
Now that we have a framework for creating a blueprint at the product team level, the next step is to discuss how this work can be applied to other membership experiences across the CBC.
There are also other possible applications for this work and the process we created. We are looking at ways to help other teams incorporate parts or all of these steps into their work.
Photo by You X Ventures on Unsplash
KEY TAKEAWAYS
As a team, we had never undertaken a project like this before, so there were a lot of things we learned along the way. One of the main things we found was that, when introducing a new user-centred approach to stakeholders, it’s often more effective to take people on the journey with you so that they can feel invested in the results.
In addition to the above, we had to navigate each teams’ priorities and roadmaps. So when introducing work such as a blueprint or journey map, we had to make it very clear that these artefacts were guides and not commitments. Once teams felt comfortable with this work as a discovery phase, there was far greater buy-in from everyone.