User Research for a B2B App Marketing Software

2023 • Qualitative study

The App Marketing Software company I worked for has a tool which helps users with App Store Optimization. With that they can improve downloads and sales of their Apps in App Store and Google Play. 

When I started there were already many ideas, concepts and features on the table so in order to get a clear picture on how aligned with customer needs these topics were I started doing user interviews.

For this I followed the process outlined in Kim Goodwin's book „Designing for the digital age“ and brought in some ideas from the Jobs-to-be-done framework.

The plan was to get from user interviews to personas with deticated JTBD. Here is a short step-by-step guide on how I worked:

1. Before the interviews I collected already existing knowledge from support, customer success and marketing. With this I created some proto-personas to get a direction and compare it to the outcome.
2. For choosing and contacting customers and arranging appointments I had the help of customer success.
3. The interviews lasted on average 45 minutes where I listened to how our customers do App Marketing and how they use our tool.
4. After 5 interviews I already started to see a pattern and was able to ask better questions and got a better feel of their needs.
5. With the transcript of the interviews and notes I took I wrote the most important quotes on post-its in figjam and grouped them by topic (Left area on the picture).
6. With this outcome I identified behavioral variables from each topic and placed the customers on this range to identify patterns (Right area on the picture).
7. I came to the conclusion that there were two behavioural patterns which differed depending on the amount of knowledge about App Marketing our customers had.
8. I then wrote together JTBD, set up personas and assigned them jobs. 

What I learned:

• A vision for your company is important but has to be checked and double-checked with your customer-base.
• Listen to customer success and support. They are your best friends.

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