Powering product discovery for Gumtree with a Dovetail research repository
Leveraging a research repository in Dovetail to support a shipping MVP for Gumtree.
I was a research partner to the Gumtree product design team during my time at Pollen. We would collaborate on regular user testing sessions where the team would test hypotheses and iterate on designs.
For this project, the team wanted to bring new value to users through either payment or shipping features. Over the course of 9 months I provided insights to the team that helped them better understand their users’ needs and test prototypes of solutions, laddering up to a live shipping feature on the app today.
The challenge
Gumtree wanted to take the ‘local’ classifieds app national with shipping, shifting users mental model of what buying and selling could be on Gumtree. Their goal was to put Gumtree within boxing reach of competitors like eBay, Facebook Marketplace and Depop.
However to implement it properly required an expensive integration with courier and payment APIs and redesign of the listing, exchange, and payment flows.
The team wanted to start with a first horizon version that helped surface listings that offer shipping but continued to keep shipping and payment off-platform and iterate from there.
The role of research was to help discover what was most important to users, what they could do without, the sticking points and to test ideas with interactive prototypes.
An iterative Agile approach to design and insights
At first a mini discovery qualitative interview section was added to the regular user testing sessions. As we learned more, the product designers began to add prototypes for the selling, trading and buying flows that tested solutions to the needs, pains and gains uncovered in the interviews.
Because we repeated testing regularly this meant we were able to interview and test prototypes with 75 participants, a huge sample size where we could start to see trends and know that results were reliable.
It goes without saying that this is a huge amount of qualitative data. How could the designers keep track of early feedback as they iterated on designs? How could various stakeholders in the business be brought along for the journey? How could prioritisation of features be justified with voice of customer?
I began to see the need for a centralised place to store all these insights, a tool that allowed us as a joint team to retain the value of research by accessing it easily.
Searchable, share-able insights on demand
Combining a tagging and reporting workflow in Dovetail enabled me to build insights into a central repository where the designers could search any time they liked and share reports to anyone in the business. The beauty of this approach is also tracking feedback on different iterations of the same flow or seeing trends emerge over time by searching a particular tag, theme or feature.
I created general tags for the platform itself, a unique set for each journey team, a dedicated board just for shipping and payments and reporting tags used for each round of testing. I used this to help track the question the designer wanted an answer to, where it was asked in the interview, the response the participant gave and how that quote became evidence to support an insight which became the building block of a research report.
Collaboration was deeply important to integrating this new way of working. To ensure the process was working well, I ran a workshop with the designers to better understand their workflow and at what points research is useful to them so that I could best tailor reporting to those needs.
In the second half of the workshop I demonstrated how to search for findings from previous rounds of testing, including tips to find related comments on a topic eg. looking also at results tagged with ‘saved search’ when interested in results for ‘search alerts’.
Impact
Creating, nurturing and promoting the repository:
Reduced duplication of studies, making research more efficient.
Allowed designers to be more agile and search findings relevant to designs earlier in the process allowing them to iterate more quickly and make decisions based on voice-of-customer.
Was integral to launching the MVP of the new shipping feature, providing quick feedback on designs
Demonstrated the value of research and the relationship with Pollen to the wider business.
Our next goals were to onboard other teams in the business to share their data too like app reviews and feedback reports.
“Cait is an amazing and kind researcher who really understands how to work with designers and product teams. I worked with her at Gumtree in various research studies where she helped us to plan studies, conduct customer interviews and usability testing. She also synthesised insights and captured them in our research repository in Dovetail. Cait and her team were also responsible to structure, and maintain our repository. I am very grateful I had the opportunity to work alongside her because I could always rely on her to deliver outstanding work on time for our team. I highly recommend Cait to any team out there looking to uncover customer insights and gain a deeper understanding of how people interact with digital products.”
Juan Cordoba, Product Design Manager
“It's so rare to meet someone with such collaborative qualities and skilful craftsmanship as Cait. She provided invaluable suggestions on research questions and was incredibly efficient at organising sessions and synthesising interviews into actionable insights. In particular she was instrumental in shaping our Dovetail repository to support the growth of our design team and scope. I will miss her cheerfulness and genuine desire to bring everyone together. I wouldn't hesitate to recommend Cait to any team.
Ray Wu, Product Designer
