During the beginning of my first year at Lix Technologies, I created a first general basis of the customer knowledge inside the organization. I conducted interviews, surveys, usability tests with the current product and exploratory research, observing students inside universities.
The main goals were to:
1. Understand who were our potential customers: What are their main pains, needs, jobs to be done and general behavior with their studies and in special their reading content.
2. Resolve internal hypothesis around student problems, behavior and evaluate potential success of a different business model.
3. Let the research surprise us: Let the information from the research guide us into new ways of understanding who were the students, what uncovered potential there is and what other stakeholders or elements are present in their relationship with the reading material.
First customer journey after conducting interviews, surveys and product testing.
Depicted above there is a representation of the journey a student would go through when using our product. Using the research insights from the signup flow process (from the moment they find the website, until they download the app) it was possible to get an overview on the most important pains from our process, from the students perspective. This journey was a key element to facilitate discussions between management and other employees, providing a common ground to better understand the student’s experience.
My direct manager and one of my colleagues discussing about the steps in the journey.
After creating this analog journey, together with our student assistant the journey was digitized into two journeys. One depicting how a student journey would look like and where could Lix have an influence in the experience. And a second one in which the journey of usage of the product is depicted. With this comparison we aimed to make clear how and where the product could improve the students lives.
Journey of any student starting to study, with specific marking of the Lix product where it could improve the students life.
To better define and understand the target group three personas were created based on the information collected from the students. The three personas depict the general behavior of students during their learning process.The first one is “The Star” student, who represents one of the minorities inside the market. This persona represents the students that have a strategy about their own learning and have a clear idea on how to be more efficient with their own processes, saving time and feeling up-to-date.
The second persona represents the biggest part of the market curve, called “The Striver”. This is the most common type of student, since the majority of students don’t have a clear idea on where their strengths remain and how can they use them in their advantage. They struggle to find a way to keep up with their assignments, group work, part-time job, and life in general.
The last one represents the smallest group of students, called “The slacker”. This persona is a student that, with time, will fall in “The striver” group, if she succeeds to motivate himself to study, otherwise this represents the students that will be hanging from other classmates, resulting in a drop-off or a change of direction. This last one represents also the interest for students to pirate content, since it is one of the most common way for students to get their content.
Personas representing the market curve: The striver represents the bigger stake of our market and the most interesting interaction with learning tools.
Once the general idea of the three personas was defined, I decided to map their expectations from a possible study related product. This gave us an idea of the trust relationships present at the moment of making a decision on what products to use or to buy and the main features that students expected a product to have.
Motivation maps created form the initial idea of the personas defined by the research.
As a main result from the research conducted with approx. 200 students in Copenhagen during the last year at Lix Technologies, it was possible for the product team to define a clearer product road map. This would reflect the needs and pains that the students expressed. Each one of this pain points is represented in our road map in features that could offer a solution to their current problems.
Slide from Lix´s CEO public Pitch deck
Everything visible in this document belongs to Lix Technologies Aps. and can't be used for any type of commercial reproduction, alteration or modification of its content.