Finding User Pain Points
1Cademy UX Research Team
Improving an online learning platform through studying its users
My Roles
- User Researcher
- Interviewer
- Note Taker
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Timeframe
September 2020 - December 2020​
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Challenge
Identify pain points users have in order to improve the onboarding process for new and incoming users. This includes creating tutorials and a new landing page for the online learning platform.
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Key Takeaways
Common pain points for users are discoverable if the right questions are asked and the right people are contacted.
Process
Jump to:
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Team
Worked with a team of undergraduate and graduate students from the University of Michigan and other schools, many of us have different backgrounds and fields of study.
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Clarifying the Problem
Our first step was clarifying the problem we were trying to solve. We knew users were having trouble with the onboarding process and learning how to use 1Cademy.
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Our goal was to utilize user feedback to make 1Cademy more usable and appealing to new users or potential users.
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Research Questions
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Why do users use 1Cademy?
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How does 1Cademy help users reach their goals?
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What are users' pain points?​
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Creating The Interview Protocol
Next, my team and I worked through a plan for conducting interviews. We created an interview script to follow that would help find the answers to the questions we had.
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This script went through many edits to minimize bias as much as possible and make sure the questions were clear and really asking questions we wanted the answers to.
Conducting Interviews
Our next step was​ to begin conducting user interviews to identify specific common problems users have. Our first interviewees were community leaders who have been using 1Cademy for a long time. We interviewed them because they use the platform the most.
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The goal of these interviews was to find common problems users have when starting 1Cademy, or common problems experienced users have when using 1Cademy.
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Analyzing the Interviews Through Affinity Mapping
After conducting interviews, we went through the interview transcripts and recordings to take key points and organize them into an affinity map using Miro, an online visual collaboration platform.
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First, we grouped the nodes by interview, then we grouped the nodes by topic. After that, we grouped the nodes by similarity within each topic. After grouping by similarity, we labeled each group, added a summary, and labeled each specific group of notes.
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By grouping the notes into groups, we are able to see the common problems that users are having with the platform. The picture shown below is about half of our total notes before we started the sorting process
User Need Statements (Deliverables)​
After discovering user pain points via affinity mapping, we were able to develop user need statements to aid in finding solutions to the pain points. These pain points helped start our onboarding flow and tutorials project, as most users expressed their trouble with getting started on 1Cademy.
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