The “Goldilocks Experience” of developing a foundational research framework — finding a practice that’s “just right”
Or: How I combined Personas, JTBD, and Journeys to make a more complete user story
Before I dig into the research, here’s a little background context about Udemy. Udemy is an online video-based learning marketplace founded in 2010 where any learner can find the right teacher in an area of interest — from Python programming to painting. Our teachers are everyday experts who want to share their knowledge (and make a little money while doing it) by creating video-based content to host on our platform. Students who are interested in learning from these experts can purchase their courses a la carte — no subscription required. We also have a B2B product, Udemy for Business, that pulls the top business courses created for the marketplace and sells them to L&D professionals as a packaged collection that can be leveraged by their company’s employees for professional development.
Because we have a wide variety of users, our research team needed to find a foundational research approach that aligns the company around a shared comprehension of each of the user group’s needs and challenges. Laying this foundational groundwork helps the product and design teams to think more strategically about the holistic user experience and identify better opportunities for improved user engagement with the product. Rooting their decisions in customer empathy builds their confidence in the choices they make, which helps drive faster and more strategic product development to truly addressing user needs — thereby stimulating an overall better experience for each of our user groups. Additionally, as a research team, building this framework has helped us play a more strategic role in the business, rather than falling into the tactical service trap into which it’s so easy for research to slip.
We approached this challenge by first creating personas, then articulating their journeys, and more recently developing Jobs-to-be-Done (JTBD). Each of these research pieces was initiated out of a need to find a better fit between the research output and what the internal stakeholders could best leverage. Because each business team utilizes data differently, it was difficult to present the right abstraction of information at the right time for each team.
After much trial and error, I arrived at a foundational research framework to suit every team’s needs — allowing everyone to share the same holistic understanding, but extract the type of information most applicable to their work. This framework is rooted in the concept that: Attitudes shape situations, which in turn shape experiences.
To use a more concrete example, take a Udemy student…
If we break this down, we’ve discovered that “Personas influence JTBD, which subsequently influence a customer’s experiential journey with our product.”
Our persona development was an amalgamation of a market segmentation and qualitative interviews — the persona looks at a student’s core beliefs around learning, with an added layer of demographic information. We found that a lot of their opinions of, and interactions with, learning are rooted in how the students define themselves as human beings.
This is very useful from a high level perspective to help understand the spectrum of a student’s appreciation for and interaction with learning. Digging deeper into what this means for Udemy, the company felt that there was insufficient direct relationship between those beliefs and how student actually interacted with our product. The company really wanted to delve into that situational cause and effect. What happens if you’re a lifelong learner, but there is a certain moment in which you don’t view learning as a means to overcome a barrier, but rather as a barrier itself? How does that change when and how a student decides to use Udemy?
Enter Jobs-to-be-Done.
Jobs-to-be-Done articulates that situational driver. The JTBD theory states that every time a person “hires” (purchases, enrolls in, etc.) a new product or service, they do so as a reaction to their situational context to achieve a particular outcome. Because a student can learn for many different reasons to achieve many different outcomes we assume that every time a student enrolls in a course they are doing so to accomplish a unique JTBD. If a student enrolls in multiple courses there is a high likelihood that the student is fulfilling different Jobs with each enrollment. In other words, while a student has a singular persona (or attitudinal component), he or she may use Udemy to fulfill multiple JTBD.
At Udemy we use JTBD as a layer of refinement within a persona — how a student views learning (their persona) shapes the situations they face, as well as how they will react to overcome a challenge or take advantage of an opportunity in their lives (their JTBD).
Let’s look at an example.
A lifelong learner may encounter different situations in her life in which she chooses to learn to either overcome an obstacle or tackle an opportunity. This lifelong learner persona trait dictates that she sees learning as a beneficial tool for her to leverage in either scenario.
Denise is a growth mindset product designer who is always looking to upskill and add new tools to her toolkit. Once a week she visits Udemy to find out if we’ve added new courses on the hottest design tools (Sketch, Invision, Adobe, etc.) to make sure she’s staying current. This constant interest in professional skill mastery is her primary Job-to-be-done.
Simultaneously in her personal life Denise has been dabbling with various interests (VR game design, crochet, woodworking, to name a few) and uses many different mediums to pique her curiosity — podcasts, magazines, mailing lists, but also Udemy. The primary reason she comes to Udemy in this situation is to explore new topics she hasn’t heard of in order to satisfy this personal curiosity Job-to-be-done.
Now to bring the third piece of the equation into play — customer journeys.
The core of a JTBD is the situation — the person’s context, motivations, progress goals, and hiring criteria. These components impact a user’s expectation of the product experience and how they will use the product to accomplish their goal. The user’s incoming mindset and expected output shapes how he or she interacts with the product, and therefore how well he or she will enjoy the experience.
Following up with Denise, our product designer:
When Denise is suddenly given a new opportunity at work to level up she asks her boss what she needs to do to get there and pushes herself to gain that knowledge. She’s positive, motivated, and is more likely to have a positive product experience because of that initial mindset and clear objective to accomplish that JTBD.
Now let’s say Denise is (sadly) let go from this product designer role. While in between jobs, she decides she wants to switch roles and pursue her VR game design interest as in her next career. While she’s done a little bit of initial learning about it there is still a lot of insecurity about what she needs to do to actually get a role in that field. And in the process of trying to figure out what she needs to do to get there, she has to deal with huge amounts of optionality — what skill to learn, which way to learn the skill, what platform to use, which course to choose, which instructor. Though she’s somewhat excited about making the transition (her persona’s trait) she’s also nervous and is more likely to get overwhelmed, leading to a less positive customer experience while trying to accomplish this career change JTBD.
While there are many of these punctuated situations (JTBD) in a person’s life, we believe that each unique JTBD has a corresponding journey, in a ratio of 1 JTBD : 1 journey. Any student learning as a means to level up will have similarly high motivations and expectations of the platform because of that incoming mindset. Students who are behind in their skills will struggle with different aspects of the product experience than someone who is leveling up.
The solution to my Goldilocks experience — finding a research framework that was “just right” for Udemy— was to link each of these foundational research components into a funnel that progressively refines our understanding of each user group.
This research framework has had a positive impact on Udemy’s understanding of its users. It has allowed each team to leverage the information that’s most applicable for their needs while staying within the shared understanding of our users. As we align Udemy to this framework, our goal is to help the company move quickly and efficiently toward an overall business strategy that speaks to our target personas and his/her main Jobs-to-be-done, allowing each user to have the best possible experience on our platform.
Want to hear me wax on about this framework? Check out my guest appearance on the ReWired Group’s podcast. Here is Cooper’s perspective on bringing these research methods together.
Interested in learning more, or talking about implementation? Please get in touch! Also, Udemy is hiring! Follow this link to join an amazing team with an empowering mission.
The beliefs and statements included in this article are my own opinions, and do not necessarily reflect those of my employer.
