Setting up continuous interviewing at Mia Health
Type of project
An initiative for changing how we operate in the design team and the company.
Role & Team
Initiating involving users in the design process on regular basis. Discussing the ideas with lead designer Valeria and incorporating her feedback.
Time
Summer and autumn of 2024.
Context: Mia Health had no B2C interview process when I joined.
Mia Health is a healthcare app startup. When I joined, it was only 1 year after the app was released, and previously, the app was tested only with friends, family and with B2B customers.
Problem: User interviews required extra effort and faced obstacles
There was no established process for interviewing B2C users. The amount of friction and effort involved made it too difficult to include user interviews in the everyday design workflow, and I wanted to change that.
Project outcome
The solution
A streamlined process for continuous interviewing
A streamlined process with templates, making it easy to go from planning interviews to gathering insights with minimal effort.
The impact
Making full design process more user-centred, saving time and money for future redevelopment
Mia now validates designs through user interviews, uncovering unexpected needs and giving stakeholders clearer insights. A simple recruiting process makes frequent feedback easy.
Process
- Creating roadmap
- Market Research
- User Reserach
- Data synthesis
- HMWs
- Ideation workshop
- Further ideation with stakeholders
- Stroyboarding
- Service blueprinting
- Low-fidelity prototypes
- Storyboards
- Designer's journey
This case study highlights:
🤝 COLLABORATION
I highlighted for you the moments where I involved other people in the project with the 🤝 emoji because I believe design is a lot about involving the right people at the right time.
🎉 LEARNINGS
All my successes (highlighted with 🎉) I take as something to reflect upon and note down as learnings for next time. You can also find a more detailed visualization of my learning process at the end of this case study
💩 FAILS
Admit it, you're most curious about where I failed and what I learned from it, right? :D Well, lucky you, it's all highlighted with the beautiful 💩 emoji :).
The story of setting up continuous interviewing
B2C user based gave us the luxury of large pool of potential user interviewees.
Thanks to a consent form during the onboaridng in the app, we were able to contact many of our users through email and invite them for interviews.Later I've found out that its optimal to contact around 100 users at a time which yields on average around 8 interviews.
An interview invite needed a few iterations
As part of our continuous interviewing efforts, we showed users sketches of the concept to gather early feedback. We learned that some users were concerned about sharing their activity during periods of illness or when they simply weren't in the mood to exercise. They expressed that constant visibility of their activity levels might feel invasive, like being "stalked" by friends.
The most commonly used recruiting template
Low response rate -> switching to Hubspot
I started sending out the invites from my outlook but soon realised some of my emails are getting blocked when I send it to 100 contacts. But even with those who got it delivered, the response rate was initially quite low. I had no idea whether the receipients didnt find the title relevant or they actually opened it but didnt find it interesting. I had no visibility into what could be wrong. Luckily we were already using HubSpot at Mia, so I was able to utilise the platform for sending the invites.
Hubspot analytics of sent email
HubSpot helped me to understand how my title and contents are performing so I could do a few iterations and see what worked the best.
Cal.com - an easy way to get booking of X interviews per week in an automated way.
Most scheduling apps are not very customisable, which means that you cannot use them to plan a full month of equally spread interviews. So I was very happy when I found out cal.com which offers exactly that and saves a lot of time. If we dont need to use a screening form, we get scheduled interviews in our calendar right after sending out the invitation email without lifiting a finger.
Unpacking the impact
User-centred way: designs are validated before going to development, ultimately saving costs.
In our monthly release cycle, this gave us a lot more confidence that what we release won't need to be redone later, because all major usability issues were already fixed.
Uncovering opportunities that were not obvious
During an interview, we discovered that a freemium user didn’t really understand what Premium included. In later interviews, we confirmed that most users were either unsure or misunderstood the benefits, and many avoided the free trial because it required sharing card details. This led us to introduce a “forced trial,” gifting users two weeks of Premium without needing a card, so they could experience the features firsthand.
Forced trial flow to educate users and let them experience the benefits of premium.
Stakeholders better understand users through interview highlights.
My goal from the beggining was to not just help us designers, but help the whole organisation to really understand who are users are and have more feel and empathy for them. First I started by inviting them to interviews, but since people were too busy and didn't see it as priority, I had to choose a different strategy. I ended up presenting short interview video highlights from the interview in a weekly company meeting after every few months of interviews.
Low-effort recruiting enables more interviews
The interviews were low effort because they were
1) easy to organise
2) easy to commit to. One, max two interviews a week didnt take too much time from regular day to day work .
