Pitly Case Study
Client: Pitly™: “Invest In Yourself”
Role: Research Lead and Product Manager
Goal: Uncover the financial habits, motivations, and barriers to investing regarding millennials.
My client, Pitly, approached me with the need of more deeply understanding its target demographic from a research perspective. Pitly’s service was successfully attracting young and curious investors but wanted to expand its reach and appeal to additional demographics who might not be as financially savvy.
Approach: Research Deep-dive into the psychology behind investing for millennials. Through deep research, including interviews, contextual inquiry, and user testing, I reported on trends and patterns that emerged in the population surveyed. Pitly’s team found my research to be eye opening and has resulted in adjustments to their product offerings and marketing messaging. The report was designed to serve the client as a reference guide to provide a consistent voice of customer.
Start with the basics: Define the problem
After defining the scope of the project and closing up some standard business formalities, I urged my client to meet in person for a kick-off meeting. While optional, I highly encourage everyone to meet face to face when possible and recap the project’s objectives. Pulling from my Product Management background—I help led a discovery session where I interviewed the client about the background, goals, and challenges he faces with his business.
Once my client and I agreed upon the scope of the project—it was time to get down to business. Our first order of business was to agree on a set of interview of questions that would work towards extracting pertinent and related details regarding our users.
TIP: Use technology to keep you organized and productive:
Assess your client’s technical abilities and promote the use of simple technologies like Google Docs for example. The temptation might be to start attaching files via email but setting up an orderly project from the start goes a long way in my experience. Hooray for collaboration tools!
After we finalized our interview questions, it came time to find and qualify interviewees who were within our target demographics.
next step: Qualify Interviewees
Users found Typeform to be extremely easy due to its 1-question at a time approach.
As a research associate and partner of Pitly, I worked with the Pitly team to define a screener survey to discover new and existing users of Pitly who fit our research criteria. To reward our interviewees for providing their time we provided incentives such as Amazon gift cards. After qualifying a few individuals, I set off to interview them. In true agile fashion, I let the first few interview results shape and refine the direction and questions of each subsequent interview.
The Interviews
Financials get touchy—but the information will flow—just relax your interviewee first.
Each interview was designed to last approximately 30-minutes which was not by accident. Due to the sensitive financial nature of the questions being asked, I found that starting with some easy, warm-up questions was critical to the quality and the depth of the answers given. The half-hour timeslot, in a private room, face-to-face seemed to be the magic combo for getting people to really open up.
Maximize your face-to-face opportunity—get usability feedback.
Once the critical questions were answered and the interview was completed, if there was time left over and the interviewee met certain qualifying criteria, I let them explore the Pitly app in efforts to gather usability feedback.
Each user was asked to complete a series of tasks and to describe their actions and thoughts in real-time. I found that once you’ve spent 30 minutes interviewing someone, they love the opportunity to try an app and offer their opinions and feedback.
Record everything in the interview and digest/synthesize/filter later:
Because surprising patterns can emerge from these usability sessions, I advise noting down all feedback without judgement or filtering. During an interview you might disregard a detail or quote that seems trivial at the time but is in-fact THE WHOLE POINT of the research project. I urge researchers to record and note down everything when conducting interviews and digest/synthesize/filter later. Consider splitting the duties between scribe and interviewer if there is room for a helper in the budget and if it seems situationally appropriate.
The Report
Comprehensive research report prepared for PItly Co by Alex Alesio.
Report is used as reference material for developers, marketers, and content strategists. Report provides high-level abstract and in-depth research on the thought-process and barriers to investing.
The Results
The data collected and presented within the report has since helped Pitly to shape and refine its service and marketing messaging. Additionally, the company now has a framework to capture future feedback and continually reference the voice of customer.
Report useful for entire organization and continues to serve as a reference for Pitly’s voice of customer. Pitly contributors and developers found the report to be highly usable thanks to thoughtful layout and chapter hyperlinking for quick navigation to relevant content areas. Since multiple audiences would be accessing the report, I organized the information in two ways. The first approach to presenting the report’s information was to summarize all findings by topic/interview question.
This provided general audiences with an easy read across all areas of the research as superfluous details were cut from this abbreviated approach. If a reader desired to go deeper, the second part of the report offered full, unabridged interview transcripts with detailed responses.
Interested in seeing more about this Pitly case study, just ask. I welcome your feedback and questions.
