Virtual Bid Case Study
UX strategy for everyone
Summary
Virtual Bid is a new app that allows contractors, such as cleaners or handymen, to conduct video calls with their clients through a web browser, allowing it to be operating system agnostic. Since its launch in March 2022, Virtual Bid has experienced many downloads, but also high attrition, with very few users even trying out the main functionality of the app. Virtual Bid reached out to Prime’s user experience team with the goal of improving their retention rates. Two of my Prime colleagues, Kevin Peterson and Brennan Kempston, worked on solutions for the retention issue and a user-requested feature, while I built a UX Strategy Toolbox for the Virtual Bid owners to help them implement UX strategy into their process until a UX designer and researcher is able to join their team. The toolbox breaks down and simplifies the UX strategy process, making it accessible to anyone who doesn’t have a UX background, so they can benefit from the high ROI of investing in UX practices.
My Role
User Experience Researcher and Strategist
DELIVERABLES
TOOLS
Zoom
Figma
Pen and paper
Google Sheets
FigJam
Keynote
METHODS
Contextual Inquiry
Cognitive Walkthrough
Stakeholder Interview
Persona
Affinity Diagramming
The Problem
Virtual Bid is a self-funded app startup consisting of a team of two and won’t be able to expand their team until they secure an investor or increase their app’s subscription revenue. UX strategy is smart investment for all businesses, but what does a business do when they aren’t in a financial place to hire a UX designer, researcher, or strategist?
Research
My research was initially planned around the idea of making UX hiring recommendations and a strategy plan for that team. Research happened in two phases. First, deepening my understanding of developing a UX strategy in different contexts, and then learning more about the users of the Virtual Bid app and the problem space.
Research Goals
Gather insights into the UX strategies in an agency or company setting.
Gain an understanding of the Virtual Bid app in its current version.
Learn about Virtual Bid stakeholders’ pain points
Stakeholder Interview
I moderated two stakeholder interviews to gather more information about the company, their goals and pain points, and their ideas for the future of the Virtual Bid app. The first interview revealed a challenge with my original plan, that expansion of the company would be limited until there was more growth of the app users and subscribers.
Contextual Inquiry
Two contextual inquiries with a UX agency owner and a UX Lead at a healthcare company kicked off my research with the goal of learning about UX strategy processes in different settings. They each walked me through their strategy processes highlighting the different people and roles involved in each stage and their interactions with them, the tools used, their workarounds, and their thinking.
Cognitive Walkthrough
To gain a better understanding of the app, I conducted a cognitive walkthrough by selecting five tasks that the contractor or homeowner should be able to accomplish with the app. I recorded the task and action steps in a spreadsheet along with recommendations. Screenshots were also taken to show the app screens required to accomplish a task.
Usability Studies
To better understand the Virtual Bid contractor user, I attended or view usability studies of the current version of the app moderated by my Prime colleagues. I learned some contractors’ pain points that would need to be addressed in future iterations of the app.
“It would be nice to customize that [text] message if that’s an option. The tone at [our company] was really important. ”
-User 1
Persona
Based on the usability studies moderated by my colleagues, I created a persona of the Virtual Bid contractor user. This would represent Virtual Bid’s primary user, the contractor, which they could use as the focus for their strategy.
Design
“Hone in on on a very specific feature set, a really specific product offering and you can make that lean and build it quickly and designing quick and get it out, you're going to be able to, to determine faster, whether or not this is actually something people want to use or will use.”
-UX agency owner
UX Roadmap
Based on my contextual inquiries, a UX Roadmap was created outlining the five phases of a UX strategy along with those phases’ objectives, actions, and opportunities. The roadmap creates a framework for the toolbox and gives an overview of the whole strategy process and the actions, a snapshot of the type of work within each phase. The five phases — discover, planning, research, design, and evaluation — create the categories within the toolbox.
UX Strategy Toolbox
I tailored the UX Strategy Toolbox experience for UX novices who have little extra time and created an abbreviated version of the strategy tools and processes that a UX designer and researcher would use, making it accessible for everyone. The goal of the toolbox is to help the Virtual Bid owners focus their new features on the user, learn what they need to about the user, design the new features or screens, and test the designs as quickly as possible and prior to pushing the designs into development.
The toolbox is divided into the five phases, with an introduction for each phase that helps provide guidance to the user and includes the phase objective, questions for the user to consider during that phase, and potential deliverables from that phase.
The introduction pages for the UX Strategy phases
An example of the information included for a UX research method
The majority of the resources in the toolbox are about how to create the deliverables for each phase, with the bulk of that information in the research phase. Based on my research of the Virtual Bid app and their users, I selected research methods to include in the toolbox that would build on the work of my Prime colleagues and be the most relevant for learning about the apps’ users and gathering users’ feedback on new designs. Each research method has a card with general information, time and financial expectations, and a simplified step-by-step guide for how to conduct the research.
Conclusion
The UX Strategy Toolbox demonstrates a way to democratize user experience design and research. Even with a high financial barrier to hiring a UX designer or researcher, Chris and Robin from Virtual Bid can use these tools to infuse UX strategy into their process as they design and build new features for the app. The step-by-step guide and templates that were handed off at the conclusion of this project allow them to carry a simplified version of this work and capitalize on the ROI of UX strategy.