Episode web page: https://bit.ly/3VNnj2G ----------------------- Rate Insights Unlocked and write a review If you appreciate Insights Unlocked, please give it a rating and a review. Visit Apple Podcasts, pull up the Insights Unlocked show page and scroll to the bottom of the screen. Below the trailers, you'll find Ratings and Reviews. Click on a star rating. Scroll down past the highlighted review and click on "Write a Review." You'll make my day. ----------------------- In this episode of Insights Unlocked, host Kerry Johnstone welcomes Veronica Bogdacenco, Channel and Optimization Manager at Tide, a leading UK-based fintech company. Veronica shares her expertise in blending marketing insights with UX strategies to create seamless and effective user experiences. She delves into the challenges of maintaining agility in a fast-growing company, creative approaches to user testing, and how AI is reshaping UX research. From her innovative weekend testing methods to leveraging in-app notifications for user feedback, Veronica provides actionable tips for product teams navigating growth and tight deadlines. She also highlights the importance of quick, iterative research to de-risk decisions and ensure clarity in regulated industries like finance. Whether you're a UX researcher, product manager, or designer, this episode is packed with practical advice for building user-centric products efficiently. What You’ll Learn in This Episode: Blending Marketing and UX: How to use qualitative and quantitative data for deeper customer insights. Maintaining Agility in a Growing Organization: Veronica’s methods for decentralizing UX research and streamlining processes. Innovative Testing Techniques: The power of weekend tests, external testers, and in-app notifications to gather feedback without disrupting workflows. AI in UX Research: How AI can enhance UX processes by automating tasks like feedback summaries and detecting emotional responses. Working in Regulated Industries: Key considerations for ensuring clarity and transparency in customer-facing designs. Scaling UX Practices: Strategies to embed UX testing into workflows as teams and product portfolios expand.
Chapter 1: What insights does Veronica share about blending marketing and UX?
So one part of my role is focused on optimizing Tide's marketing technology staff, making sure that our marketing teams have the tools and everything they need to run impactful campaigns. But another key part of my role, which is probably more relevant to this discussion, is around optimizing the in-app experience.
I look specifically after the subscription funnels, which is one of the key products at Tide, but also I had to optimize different other screens or journeys in the app. So obviously, because of that, we always have to try to understand what drives our members you know, to these specific strains, what motivates them to take action, and that's where usability testing comes into play.
I think it's really interesting how you have the marketing background, but also this work around optimizing the digital experience as well. It sounds like quite a broad and very blended role. How did you get started in working in user insights and getting insights from your customers and your users?
Yeah, you're not the first person to ask that. And I think it comes from the fact that, you know, in marketing, you always look at your quantitative data. So you look at how many visits a landing page gets, you know, whether those people convert and so on. But what you don't know is why that happens.
Initially, I started working with different tools in digital experience, you know, like the usual hot jar and those kind of tools to get more insights into that. But still, a lot of times you kind of paint a picture, but unless you ask those people the questions, you'll just end up with some assumptions.
I think that's the real power of bringing qualitative and quantitative data together is that they tell two halves of the same picture. So one of the challenges that can come with being a fast-growing company is how you maintain that sort of startup agility and nimbleness and able to respond to the market and to your feedback while also growing, scaling, adopting more processes perhaps.
So how have you worked to preserve that UX agility as Tida's grown?
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Chapter 2: How can you maintain agility in a growing organization?
If you have a look at my experience, I've worked from startups, scale-ups to really big companies. And, you know, the bureaucracy in a very large organization where you have to go through endless approvals and, you know, brief everything in, it just... I don't really resonate with that. So I always try to see what I can do with the tools I've got, with the resources I have as quickly as possible.
So yeah, I guess one of the key strategies I found to maintain that UX agility is to try and sort of decentralize some of these testing processes. So for example, at Tide, we do have a dedicated UX research team. But they're so stretched across multiple projects in teams, which means we cannot always wait for our turn.
So also the other aspect is that we're limited to how many tests we can run concomitantly, which means that usually the larger projects would take priority. So to work around all of this, I started trying to run tests over the weekends, for example, because I know nobody's really competing for those slots. So I'd launch a test on a Friday, 5 p.m. Obviously, I'd have the test ready.
5 p.m., I'd hit launch. And then I know for certain that by Monday, when I start work, I'd have the results in. Or if I know that I need more people in those tests, then I would simply log back on on a Saturday afternoon and just duplicate the test and re-launch it.
Honestly, this takes a couple of minutes and it was such a game changer for me because it meant I'm not tied to any of those schedules. I don't have to negotiate for slots. It's very easy. Another strategy is to reuse templates that have been used in, you know, other tests. Because usually those templates are set by the UX team. There's a lot of thought gone into that.
So I would just go in, duplicate it, adapt it for what I need to be tested. And then, you know, you go, Bob's your uncle.
I think it's really smart to be making the most of that weekend time. You can launch a test, have it collecting data in the background and ready for you with results on Monday morning. It's a really smart way to optimize our time and how we use our time efficiently. I'm really interested to hear more about your use of templates as well. How do you, within your team, manage templates?
How do you decide as a team what you want to turn into a template, what you don't? How do you evaluate the effectiveness of your template library?
So I guess it depends a lot on what that is. If you think about a card sort or a tree test, obviously there's not much really to have as a template there. But when it comes to think out loud tests, for example, you have your standard questions around confidence and effort. which I think those should be included in any test.
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Chapter 3: What innovative testing techniques can improve user experience?
And coming back to the testing over the weekends to help speed up your reach, make the most of your different slots... What are some of the biggest benefits that you see when running those unmoderated tests and how do you make sure that you're getting the effective, actionable insights from your unmoderated testing? Excellent question.
So I know a lot of people probably say, well, you know, if you invite people that are not your actual users, then those insights are not as valuable. I tend to disagree with that because the way I approach this is I would normally run a test initially with some testers from an external panel. I would find some patterns. I would get some insights.
I would then work with the design team to optimize the prototype or whatever I'm testing. I would run another test to make sure that that has improved. And then in a third test, I would actually try and invite real members, real customers. In terms of getting the insights and making sure they're valuable, the way I do this is I try to quantify the feedback that I get.
And obviously, you have your success rate, abandonment, and so on. that come out of box with most of these tools but what I do is I actually go through well I used to listen to the transcripts before the chat you know before chat GPT I used to play back like to X speed, so as quickly as possible. And I would just mark them as good, bad, ugly.
And then I would try and quantify and say, you know, 70% of users said this is confusing. 20% really liked this feature. Now with ChatGPT, obviously that's so much easier because you can just copy paste the transcript into ChatGPT and then it would spit a summary sheet.
It's quite funny that everybody that I speak to that watches back user research sessions of any kind, nobody listens to them on one time speed. Everybody's one and a half, two times. I think it's so funny that that's so common, no matter who's doing the research or what type of research.
It's really interesting to hear that you're combining non-customers and customers throughout the same project almost, so starting with the non-customers, working your way to then testing with customers later on. How does the feedback between those two groups compare? Do you notice differences in the types of feedback that you get, or is it quite comparable between the two groups?
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Chapter 4: How is AI reshaping UX research and processes?
I think when it comes to standard things, I think it could apply to anyone. But when it comes to more specific product or industry things, then yes, there might be some differences. Our customers, Tide members, as we call them, they're probably already used to some of these journeys, to some of the screens or the names of the products. That has to be taken into account.
But generally, especially at the beginning, it's surprising how people that have no idea about your product can pick up on some things that need to be improved.
I guess it comes back to you would hope that when you're designing a screen that anybody could pick it up for the first time and be able to make sense of it. You know, a first time user perhaps coming along who's not used your product before. So I guess testing with non-customers in a way is like as close as we can get to perhaps testing with first time users.
Absolutely. And of course, you know, we do target people that kind of match our target audience. So we look at small and medium enterprises, freelancers, startups. But yeah, yeah, I think it just the experience has to make sense to anyone.
One of the things that you also make use of at Tide is intercepts or in-app notifications as a way of reaching your users for testing. So when you're using a method like that, where you're popping something up mid-flow for someone.
What do you need to consider in terms of when to make that intercept so that you're balancing, you're getting that feedback without perhaps disrupting them in their flow?
Oh, so it's interesting because I actually came up with this idea off the back of a struggle to invite real members via the standard process, which is So you need to define your audience, you need to reach out to the CRM team, they have to build an email, that campaign has to go live. If someone's targeted with multiple emails, then they might not get it and so on.
So you need to get approval from CRM. of the finance team to pay out these incentives. Like the whole process is so convoluted that I thought surely there must be something easier than this. So because we already have in-app notifications, which are based on thousands of data points that we've got, then I thought surely we could just invite them to take part in these tests
through these in-app notifications. So at Tide specifically, they're placed in a few points in the app, so it wouldn't necessarily interrupt their journey. However, in some of my previous companies, yes, we used the hot jar of I think it's called a survey or the small thing that pops in the corner of your screen. And obviously that can be triggered on specific landing pages.
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Chapter 5: What are the key considerations for working in regulated industries?
Also, it can be triggered based on specific actions if your podger is set up in the right way. So again, yes, they can be a bit intrusive. They shouldn't stop the user from actually finalizing whatever journey they're on.
And when you run research in this way versus perhaps a more traditional email campaign, but besides the recruitment part of it, are there any other differences or benefits that you see to taking the in-app intercept approach?
Oh, absolutely. We don't have to necessarily go through the process of getting budget approved because you'd be surprised how many users just want to be heard and to share their opinion on something. So, yeah, I think this is a key advantage. once someone receives an email, you go through the whole thing and probably ask, what's in it for me? Why would I give you my time?
This is usually their moderated sessions, which need to be scheduled in advance and so on. Whereas with an in-app notification, there's something that you can see on your screen, hey, do you have five minutes for this quick test? And I think that's
because a lot of the moderated sessions are so long or even like surveys that you receive, you get to sort of question number 15 and you're already bored and you want to drop off. Whereas the key with these tests is just to keep them very short and very focused. And then, yeah, a lot of people just want to take part and they don't have to be necessarily paid for that.
It sounds like you've been doing a lot of research over a long period of time, building up a lot of insight and understanding into your customers. As you build up that knowledge and you've got all that past research that you can draw on, how do you then reuse that data perhaps going forwards and to answer newer different questions that come up in the future?
When it comes to what sole traders need versus registered businesses or a company's just starting out versus an established one, I think these are all things that we just need to... build upon we don't want to reinvent the wheel and I'm sure as Tide continues to grow these insights will just keep on growing but I think for any specific things that we want to validate
I always recommend running tests, even if it's something quick, dirty, easy. It's better to validate something, even if maybe the answer isn't 100% accurate, than to not even go through that process and then build something that people might not know how to use or might dislike.
Yeah, I think sometimes, as a researcher myself, we get very caught up in doing the best research that we can, doing the perfect research, the most rigorous research, but sometimes imperfect research.
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Chapter 6: How can UX practices be scaled effectively?
To me, this is a given. I'm not sure if my colleagues also see usability testing in the same way. But for me, building something, investing all that resource into building something, putting something live that I don't know how it's gonna work, I just think
And even if it comes to experiments, because a lot of times we say, oh, you know, we're just going to run an experiment with live users, but then there's so many variations, like there's so many things we could be testing. How do I know what our best bet is? And that's how, yeah, I would approach it.
I'd probably just run a few usability tests, figure out the two best variations, and then, you know, we could build the experiment and test with real users.
We can't do a tech podcast without asking the question that everybody wants to know about, the AI question. So in terms of the research that you do at Tide, as AI continues to grow, develop, become more advanced, how can you see that potentially changing the way that you approach gathering user insights?
So I think the AI will be sort of your dedicated UX researcher. I think, you know, it's already reshaping the field. It can help you select the right test. It can help you draft a script, summarize results. It just makes the whole process way more efficient. So I think in the future, it will go even further, maybe analyzing like, non-verbal cues, facial expressions, eye movement during tests.
And I know this sounds quite futuristic, but I actually think, you know, we will soon be able to decode some of these emotional responses in real time. And this is going to be like a whole new layer of insight.
And if we do get to that future where we have the AI that can do the visual cues the facial expressions that can give you that emotional insight in real time how could you see you using that and what impact might that have what might that enable for you?
I think obviously it's an amazing opportunity. And I'm not sure exactly what the ethical implications would be, especially in highly regulated industries such as finance or gambling, for example. But I would absolutely love to try it at least and see the value that I would get. But I assume, again, a lot of the testers would probably not want
to share that because right now, most of it is just audio. So imagine, you know, having to be recorded and know that all your facial expressions and eye movement are being monitored. I think that can be a bit scary for a lot of people. So yeah, definitely want to try it. I need to see what it involves even in terms of cost and but excited about these changes.
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