Conference Presentation: Customer Researchers as Health Professionals

A colleague and I will be in Las Vegas next week for the yearly AMA Marketing Research Conference. We will be presenting a session on user experience research entitled Customer Researchers as Health Professionals - How eBay Uses Research to Improve Product Health (view a slightly shortened version online here, or below).

I'll try to summarize briefly what we will be talking about. We start with a little context about how research works at eBay and where it sits in the organization, and then we go over the research strategy I head up at eBay, called Product Health. We use a variety of quantitative and qualitative user experience research methods to track the health of different eBay site areas (or key flows) over time. Below is a schematic of the different research components of Product Health, which, as you can see, aims to cover a broad and holistic view of the Product:

It is our point of view that there is no single research methodology that can tell a complete story. If you want to have a holistic view of your product and how users feel about it and interact with it, it is essential to combine a variety of methodologies together, and keep doing the research over time so that you are able to (1) accurately assess how you're doing, and also (2) identify the areas that need to be improved. The quantitative components help us understand what is happening, and the qualitative components help us understand why we're seeing what we're seeing, and how to fix it.

We also spend some time talking about a synthesis project we did, where we pulled together the results from all the different Product Health research components, and used the insights to come up with 5 guiding principles for product development, which we believe translates pretty well to any e-commerce organization:

• Build Trust. Be responsive to customer needs for security and service. Ensure the quality and accuracy of the information available on the site. Build responsibility and accountability in the online community.
• Simplify. Streamline and clarify processes, navigation, site performance issues and fees that can make the customer’s experience unnecessarily complex and impact commerce.
• Be Relevant. Design an experience around how people naturally explore, evaluate and purchase items. Provide relevant, quality information that supports this experience.
• Provide value. Align buyers and sellers with a common means of determining item value fees. Treat sellers as “paying customers” who deserve value-added service for the fees they pay.
• Connect people through commerce. Leverage areas on the site to connect people with common interests through commerce.

We feel that this is a great example of how user-generated insights gathered in a methodologically robust way can drive product strategy and resource allocation effectively within an online organization. So, anyway, if you happen to be in Vegas next week, come check it out!