Building research-informed strategy
A case study centred around bringing in and building up a research function to help make key users insights understandable, actionable and valuable to the business and its overall strategic approach. It’s about research directly affecting the bottom line, for the better.
A company with only half the story
The Racing Post had no internal research function and only leaned on marketing surveys, analytics and whoever shouted at them most on social media.
They weren’t considering the customer or the customer experience in a holistic manner, user needs were definitely NOT driving product or commercial strategy. They were missing big opportunities and chasing some innappropriate product solutions (costing time and money) as they didn’t actually understand the fact that not all of their customers thought and acted just like them! (Especially the ones Racing Post could actually monetise.)
I took on trying to get the voice of the customer into the day-to-day conversations and the overall strategy.
RACING POST / SSG
- My role: Director of Product Design and Research
- The Team when I started:
2 digital designers, no UX Researchers, no market researchers
RACING POST: Breaking down bias
What they thought they knew about their customers
Of the insights they did have, their view of users came from:
- Incomplete analytics on the website and apps, nearly no tracking on the Android app. Data was incomplete, nichely-targeted and skewed at best.
- User personas created 3 years prior by marketing. Mostly quant (survey) based with some analytical validation data used to create them. Based on an obsolete version of the website; the apps experiences were not included and the main metric tracked for differentiation between personas (betting) did not equate with the core mission of the company. The persons included habits but not process or revenue related engagement with Racing Post itself.
- Ad hoc UX experimentation had happened over 2 years. Inconsistent reporting, small user sets that mostly focused on tactical innovation pieces and not larger user understanding
Racing Post had some ideas of WHAT their users were doing but not WHY or HOW.
The Start of the UX Research Team
To help the company revamp the product to be more usable and monetisable, we needed to know more about how users interacted with Racing Post as a brand and our products specifically:
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- Who was buying our subscriptions?
- Who was betting through our products?
- Who was taking up our affiliate offers?
- What was their process for betting or enjoying horseracing in general– where did Racing Post fit in that journey?
- How was technology affecting how they engaged with horseracing?
- How, when and where did any crossover between print, digital and bet shop display products happen?
Enter in our first researcher: Andrea (a contractor as a POC)
Her first projects included:
- Rounding up previous user insights that already existed in the company (ie marketing product personas, the ad hoc innovation testing data)
- Conducting an Ease of Use study for both the website and apps
- Running a survey and user interviews around betting behaviour and subscription uptake
Insights + Inclusion
Running the research for both the Ease of Use and the Betting Behaviour / Subscription Uptake studies involved sending out surveys, but also a LOT of user interviews involving actually using and recording the use of the products.
This was our opportunity to get stakeholders and qualitative skeptics involved and exposed to how this research was done.
- Video links to the user interviews were distributed company-wide for anyone to observe
- Stakeholders were allowed to send in questions during some of the interview sessions, which helped to debunk some assumptions
- Video summaries and clips from specifically interesting insights / behaviour were accessible to most people and were also added to insights reports to drive points home
These two pieces of work accomplished four very big things for research in the company:
- It made research and insights of actual users (both current and growth audience) accessible to everyone in the company, allowing important discussions to occur
- It started to reveal the gaps in insights the company had by relying mostly on quant data. Real, beneficial changes off the back of the insights started to show up in the product
- This work led to the development of new personas – ones that included process and would be the basis for the digital transformation work about to start…
- These reports started to raise big questions and pose big opportunities for Racing Post’s digital strategy going forward.
RESEARCH ADDING VALUE AND GROWING
Our first research put down a lot of great foundations around methodologies, rigour, ways of working, collaboration and influence. The UXR team was now going to an integral part of the largest piece of digital work the company had every done, Project Janus.
Project Janus was a digital transformation piece that would touch all of the B2C products and would work in concert with a larger database restructing piece going on at the same time.
The two core objectives of the project were:
- Get the Racing PostB2C racing products (web and apps) onto a new tech stack to allow updates, additions and changes to the product to happen MUCH faster – bringing value to the customer and staying competitive.
- Update the UX to be more user focused with more user input, while also modernising and rebranding the user interface. Not just a “lipstick job”, but also not a complete overhaul – that crunchy middle. User needs would now directly influence engagement and revenue strategy.
UX Research would be core to running our discovery processes to improve the user experience.
- We would need more researchers.
- We’d need new process.
The new process with Research right at the centre
To get through the mountain of scope and discovery for this project, I hired two more researchers and implemented rolling design sprints that included:
- Pre-sprint research – time for research to get ahead of the upcoming journeys being tackled in future sprints
- A sprint kick-off where user insights that would influence how to solve user problems for the sprint were presented to stakeholders from the start
- Concept / design validation testing any stakeholder could watch
- End of sprint show and tell to highlight how the user insights shaped the design and effectiveness of a feature
- App beta testing period to follow up on these insights and help inform how to tackle any issues without creating new ones
THE IMPACT ACROSS THE ORGANISATION
Through this design sprint process, the Racing Post organisation got to see, first hand, the value of having an internal research resource – the importance of people in the company whose main mission is to have conversations (not proclamations) with their customers to both address problems but also uncover opportunities.
Towards the end of the Janus project, my team also grew to encompass design and resesarch for our B2B products (e.g. bookmaker betshop displays) and our US sports based affiliates site.
The research team grew form 1 to 5, including a research manager, a quant specialist, a qual specialist and two grad placements.
The research team helped business stakeholders and those in product to know the day-to-day process and perception of Racing Post users, not just of the Racing Post itself but also it’s competitors and horseracing itself. This led to critical areas of the products to be reconsidered for the better (e.g. the betting flow in apps) and for new successful products to be designed and developed (e.g. Smart View) that may have never been touched without the insights research provided.
By lifting the lid on how UX Research worked, how to utilise qualitative insights alongside analytics, surveys and other quant methodologies, the Racing Post’s attitude towards considering user needs strategically and tactically changed dramatically. Users were far more front-and-centre in their product strategy approach.
RESULTS
1. The team grew 5 fold within 3 years
2. User insights became a critical part of kicking-off most product projects and roadmap priorities
3. Other departments, like editorial, started to request help from UX Research to help them refine how they engaged users better in their specific areas (e.g. new ways of displaying content) and strategically plan for the future
4. Research work in s the B2B area of the business created a value-add for the Racing Post proposition when pitching new clients
Specific outcomes
• The new UX research based personas, which included previously underserved audiences that were more monetisable than the core audience RP had previously focused on, produced new features and user flows that increased in-app betting revenue by 10% and news content engagment by 3+ news pages or more per session.
• Research specifically done around Smart View, especially the in-person, on-track intercept research, led to the refinement and launch of one of Racing Post’s most successful products for B2C and B2B in the last 5 years.
• UX Research handling the beta testing surveys and user interview follow-ups, helped de-risk the product launch of the new (Janus) apps and website features by highlighted crucial area to fix / address.
For how I re-geared a pre-existing research team at Gumtree to be more visible, better utilised and to provide more value to the organisation overall, I can provide a case study upon request.
Want more detail?
This is just the topline . I am happy to go into more relevant detail. Just contact me and let me know which areas you’d like to know more about.
