User Research at Tradesy 

Customer feedback is one of the main things that I value when working through the problem. At Tradesy, I implemented a foundation for Tradesy's UX Lab consisting of surveys, monthly in-person user testing, unmoderated user testing and more. My latest endeavor was creating personas by doing qualitative research. 

RECRUIT + INTERVIEW + OBSERVE

We reached out to 500 customers across our main cities and was able to talk to 6 buyers, 8 sellers and 8 dual users. From there, we created questions that could help us understand our customer's goals, behaviors, attitudes and lifestyles. Examples of questions we had:

• Background Information (e.g. age, where they live, hhi, marital status, children, hobbies, profession, etc)

• Domain Knowledge (e.g. what they know about Tradesy, where they found out about Tradesy, what they do on Tradesy, etc)

• Goals (e.g. goals, why do they come back, define success)

• Attitudes and Motivations (e.g. likes, values, hesitations, motivations, etc)

• Processes (e.g. shopping/selling behaviors, how do they use Tradesy, etc)

• Environment/Tools/Technology (e.g. understanding what devices and where)

• Pain Points (e.g. where did they run into issues, what can we do better)

• Mental Models (e.g. thoughts on preowned vs new, relationships w/ buyer or seller, attachment to items, etc.)

• Future (e.g. what would their ideal experience be)

FINDING PATTERNS

Once all the interviews were done, we tried to find patterns by mapping out their motivations and creating affinity diagrams with the content. 

SUMMARIZING

Based on the small sample set, we were able to find patterns for 3 different types of sellers, 2 different types of dual users and 3 buyers. 

The next step is to do quantitative research with a larger sample set to understand whether or not we found meaningful patterns. We also want to start creating user journeys for these personas to understand where the biggest pain points are. 

User Researcher: Emily Tong

tong.emi@gmail.com
LinkedIn
@_emilytong_

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