22 Nov, 2021

Case study: Audiens market fit 
Painting a picture

Team 
UX designer, UX researcher

Project scale
4 Months, 14 Design sprints, 100+ user interviews

Stakeholders
CEO, VP Tech, Head of Product, Head of Marketing

Background
Audiens is an easy-to-use customer data platform for marketing teams. Combine data sources, send personalised emails and boost customer lifetime value with next-step suggestions from real data analysts. The business had taken funding and was attempting to pivot after GDPR had ended its existing revenue stream. Some initial work had been done to shape a new direction for the business and find market fit but in user interviews the product and marketing collateral was still confusing prospects.

Audiens had been running users sessions although the frequency combined with long design sprint cycle, meant that too many changes were being made between tests making it hard to correlate successes and refocus in the next cycle. Participants regularly took different journeys through the app and by the end most participants where more interested in a promised £50 Amazon voucher than the product they had just been shown.

Most participants were more interested in a £50 Amazon voucher than the product they had just been shown

Role
As Head of UX & Design at Audiens I was responsible for managing, planning, monitoring, and coordinating UX and design projects. For this project, I was responsible for the UX and visual design along with coordinating the research schedule, which we ran using an external contractor. 

Project Goals
The goal was to ‘paint a picture’ of the product in such a way that participants in a user session could identify the significant value that Audiens could bring to their organisation. Audiens would also benefit by developing a shared internal product language.

We had three primary objectives:

  1. Build a ‘bowling ally’ journey that participants consistently progressed though the site and demo.

  2. Participants recognised Audiens as a solution to one of their struggles

  3. Reduce the time it took participants to reach that moment

The setup
We ran user interviews 5-7 times a week with participants who fitted our ‘ideal customer profile’ but who had not visited audiens.com or used the site. These leads were screened and created by the marketing team though ‘lead magnets’ on LinkedIn.

The sessions ran remotely and consisted of a series of general questions to further screen and provide background on the company and marketing team size for context. Participants were then taken tough the marketing website and and demo app.

Test 001
Initially a generic website was produced to lead users into the demo application. The bulk of our test involved cycling through a number of core concepts that the business had identified as points of value.

Test 004
A single point of value was identified in a function called ‘Recommended actions’. It became clear over a number of further tests that the more instructional these became, the more they resonated.


Test 012
When the core functionality was clear and most participants saw value at the end of the journey a video was created to shorten the time it took to demonstrate value.

Conclusion
On average 9 out of 10 ICPs interviewed during the final 3 tests voluntarily asked to join our beta program or requested a sales call.