swrm: Validating Value Propositions for Environmental Start-Up
Keywords: Survey, Customer Segmentation, In-Depth Interview, Lean Entrepreneurship, Customer-Centered Research
Context
swrm is a software start-up with the mission to help people live a more sustainable lifestyle using technology. The company has released an app in the app store. The app’s users are growing slowly and the company needed strategic recommendations on how to improve their existing app
Team
I entered the company as an intern and I’m the only UX researcher on this project. I worked very closely with the co-founders on identifying the problems and the research requirements.
Project Kickoff
Initially, the cofounders wanted me to work on improving the existing app features. I provided a thorough heuristic analysis of the existing app using Nielsen’s 10 heuristic and pointed out several outstanding issues that need to be fixed. But after having several meetings with swrm’s founders to understand their business’ value hypotheses, target customer segment, I found that their previous research on value hypothesis validation asked many leading questions and was not rigorous. Since the app’s success depends on a valid value hypothesis, I recommended to the stakeholders the need to validate their value hypothesis with a customer-centered research project.
Participants
I recruited participants who are among swrm’s target customers. To do that, I used a screener in the survey to screen out people who are not within their target population.
I also segment their users based on their level of expertise in sustainability and their involvement/passion in sustainability.
Method
I designed an online survey using Google Forms to look at people’s sustainability habits and attitudes and broke down the target population into two distinct segments with a screening question in the survey. I complemented the 115 survey responses with 8 in-depth 1:1 interviews to understand people’s motivations and desires in making transitions to a sustainable lifestyle and the problems that they may have encountered along that journey.
For the survey, I want to understand within swrm’s target population, how many or what is the percentage of people might be interested in their product. Because their product is aiming to solve the problem for users to choose a more sustainable (hence a product with less carbon footprint), in the interview, I zoom in on the decision making process of participants in terms of how they decided and choose sustainable items.
Key Findings:
I found that carbon footprint is not in common people’s vocabulary, they would look at the packaging to see how easy it is to wash it for recycling purposes, but they failed to understand what carbon footprint means to them. It does seem to be a more technical term for average people to understand.
Secondly, people when choosing products, looking at more than just sustainability, but also the product’s utility or its functionality, for instance, if they are choosing a shampoo bottle, it’s not just the message of the company that sells sustainable products but also does this shampoo really helps my hair, does it make my hair healthy, and the price, etc. so if we are building a tool for people to choose consumer products, it makes little sense to just look at suitability alone, apart from all the other factors that users might want to consider when shopping for a product in a grocery store.
Use case for a carbon footprint calculator is small. People tend to buy similar things in terms of grocery, and in fact even the most environmentally aware person that i interviewed, told me he’s wanting to cut down the times that he calculated his carbon footprint.
Recommendations
To repackage their mobile app into something that is more commonly understood by people such as a sustainability rating system because carbon footprint is a somewhat technical term and not many people understood it well.
To build a system that also would take into consideration of other factors such as price, usability or quality,
To work with business partners, companies or grocery stores for “carbon labeling” to raise awareness of carbon footprint, 1) consumers currently don’t know very much about what this means 2) some consumers don’t think it’s their responsibility to look that info up by themselves.
Reflection: what I can do differently
Perhaps I can do the interview first and then use the results from interview to write a survey
For instance, later in the interviews, I discovered many folks don’t know what carbon footprint means to them, but I’m not sure if this is prevalent among other people. I can use survey as a way to verify how many/ what’s the percentage of people that actually knows about carbon footprint - maybe I can ask people to rate their familiarity with carbon footprint on a scale from 1-5, or something like that.
Another thing I think would be helpful is that I can also use the interview answers as a way to provide options for people to choose from for check box questions that involves for instance of asking what type of product people have calculated carbon footprint, I heard from many interviewers that they have done carbon offset while on air craft and I haven’t provided a specific option for that when designing the survey because I designed the survey first.