Interviewing users to discover the platform's perceived value
Torre launched a value testing initiative to make sure its platform and services were aligned with the user's needs and goals.
Leveraging the 'job-to-be-done' framework and an in-house value-testing guide recently developed, I interviewed users to identify their value perception of Torre across four different aspects: functional, social, monetary, and psychological.
This effort resulted in more than thirty new initiatives added to the product roadmap, ten user testimonials collected, and twelve user personas created. All aimed at ensuring the product supports users in achieving their 'job-to-be-done'.
Company:
Torre.ai
Role:
UX Researcher
Tools used:
Notion, Zoom, Paper, Pen
What is Torre?
Torre is an AI-powered platform that helps job seekers find job opportunities and talent seekers find ideal candidates. By analyzing thousands of data points and leveraging its proprietary algorithm, Torre tailors matches based on skills, preferences, roles and many other factors.
Being a double sided market, Torre has two types of users: job seekers and talent seekers. In my case, I was in charge of doing the research for the talent seeker side. This could include independent recruiters, headhunters, startup founders, HR managers, or any other creative/fancy name we use to call people who recruit talent.
The 'job-to-be-done' framework
Like many startups, Torre was in a constant cycle of iteration to achieve product-market fit to scale exponentially, and we knew if we were solving a real problem for a group of users by using the 'job-to-be-done' framework (read more about it in this blog post by bubble.io).
In simple terms, what this framework says is that a customer is going to hire a product or service to help them get a job done. For example, if I'm driving to work in the morning and I'm hungry, I'll 'hire' a milkshake to get the job 'satisfy my hunger' done. You may ask why a milkshake and not a sandwich or a banana, well I'll let Clayton Christensen (the man who coined the term himself) explain it much better in the video below.
Go to the minute 2:53 for Clayton's explanation of why users bought a milkshake driving to work, over other options.
Anyways, a key component of this framework is understanding the user's functional and emotional needs, as well as their pain points. This is usually done via user interviews.
But Torre's research efforts had a couple of problems:
It lacked consistency, which made it difficult to compare results and identify patterns.
The information wasn't organized correctly, which resulted in insights being lost or misclassified.
The goal was to change the research process to obtain valuable and actionable insights.
Interviewing users
To tackle the challenge, we leveraged a new value test research guideline co-developed with the Design team (you can see it here), to conduct user interviews for each segment of talent seekers.
Step 1: Segmenting users
As seen in the diagram below, the first step was segmenting the users considering their type of service, their stage in the conversion funnel, and other special segments.
By doing this, we could adjust the questions throughout the interview and make sure to understand each segment's needs and pain points.
Step 2: Getting talent seekers to interview
Once segmented, I needed to align with the Operations and Sales team to reach out to talent seekers and request thirty minutes of their time. To recruit the 'newly aware' segment, I cold messaged talent seekers on LinkedIn, and on Slack and Discord communities.
Believe it or not, this was the hardest part of the entire process. Why? Because people are usually not willing to give thirty minutes of their time without something in return, and we didn't offer anything in exchange to avoid any positive bias towards Torre.
Some of the talent seekers ghosted us, even after scheduling an interview.
Step 3: Running the interview
In a very summarized way, below is how we set up our interview methodology and the step-by-step to approach value testing.
Step 4: Reporting all the findings
The research aimed to evaluate Torre’s perceived value across four dimensions:
Functional: how does the product help the user.
Social: how the product allows the user to connect to others.
Monetary: how much is the user willing to pay for the product.
Psychological: what feelings does the product generate in the user.
All the findings from the interviews were grouped by segment and compiled into a report for each segment. Each report included:
Value perception across the four dimensions.
User personas based on the talent seekers interviewed.
User testimonials, when consent was given to share them as marketing material.
A list of ideas and actionable items to improve the platform based on the findings and insights.
Key takeaways and learnings
Overall, across all user segments I…
Interviewed 30 talent seekers and gathered 10 testimonials that could be used on our website.
Created 12 user personas to reflect diverse user needs and behaviors.
Proposed 31 efforts to be added to the product roadmap.
And personally, I learned…
That getting participants is probably the hardest part of the process, so plan ahead of time and always ask for referrals to keep the pipeline going.
To remind participants of the interview length upfront, to avoid stalling or rushing.
To not worry about taking notes right away, and instead focus fully on the interview to avoid missing insights or losing the chance to follow up with questions that might lead to them.
For confidentiality reasons, I can't share the full research details or testimonials, but I can share some examples of user personas that were created.
