Though I’ve been meeting in-person with stakeholders all summer long to learn about their needs and pain points, I recently sent out a 16-question survey to our amazing Customer Experience and Operations teams, Bedpost’s primary users, in order to gather more usability insights.

Q + A Highlights

Though the survey included standard questions such as “What are the top 3 actions you perform on Bedpost?” and “How would you rate the ease of Bedpost’s navigation?”, the question that turned out to elicit the most helpful answers was “If Bedpost were an animal, what kind of animal would it be?” (Thanks to Lydia, who asked this during user interviews for Casper.com’s checkout flow, for the idea!)

Here are some of the answers I received:

Bedpost is Frankenstein — and that counts as an animal right?

An orca because it’s huge, hard to manage, not easy to understand (because orcas are the serial killers of the ocean), it has functions that aren’t human or relatable. It’s like Blackfish/Tillikum.

An oyster because it holds a wealth of information but it looks ugly and useless.

A hyena — they aren’t the most adorable animals, but they’re scrappy and for the most part get the job done/find a way to survive/get by.

Sphinx. Because sometimes it gives you riddles that you have no idea how to answer, but you know the Sphinx still has all that knowledge.

An octopus — its intelligence isn’t something humans can fully grasp but we know it’s got a ton of insight and learnings to offer. Also it does whatever the heck it wants and can wriggle out of situations via a quarter-size hole.

A rhino. Sometimes it’s bold and helpful and right in your face and sometimes it crushes your hopes and dreams and boots you back to the beginning.

I don’t think my coffee has kicked in enough for me to answer this question.

These responses, in addition to being creative and funny, hold so much valuable insight because they reveal the user’s emotional experience using Bedpost. They show me that many users see it as a rich, useful tool that just needs to have its information presented in a more intuitive way in order for it to realize its ~full potential~.

Affinity Mapping

After I gathered all of my survey responses, I created an affinity diagram. What is an affinity diagram, you ask? It’s an extremely useful UX design technique to make sense of qualitative data. Plus, you get to use sticky notes with fun colors.

I started with the question “If you could give Bedpost a makeover, what would you do first?” and mapped each response I received to a pink sticky note. Some examples of individual responses: “Build a different navigation so we can cut down on how long the dropdowns/scroll times are,” “Update search functions for easier use,” and “Make it look a lil cuter like Solidus!” #ShoutoutToSolidus

Once each response had its own sticky note, I began grouping them into common themes. For example, some focused on navigation, others on search, and others mentioned specific features that they wanted to see integrated into Bedpost. Once they were all grouped, I took green sticky notes and wrote overarching “I” statements, from the user’s perspective, for each group. So, for the question “If you could give Bedpost a makeover, what would you do first?” there were five main “I” answers: “I would make it look better aesthetically,” “I would make the navigation more intuitive and efficient,” “I would make it easier to search for certain things,” “I would organize lists to make them easier to comprehend,” and “I would add necessary features and remove unnecessary features.”

I went on to repeat this process for a few other complex questions in my survey: What do you find most frustrating? If you could choose, what would you be able to do on the homepage?

My Takeaways

How can we convert these findings into action items to better Bedpost’s user experience? We already know that the main problem is important data not being intuitively represented, but what does intuitive representation specifically look like?

Because having to toggle between different pages and navigation in general is a major pain point for many users, a user-specific dashboard on the homepage with relevant information, such as warehouse inventory levels and batch processes, would cut down on time spent on common tasks. Same goes for implementing a shipment search function in the nav bar, or turning long dropdown lists into auto-complete text fields (or at least organizing them alphabetically/categorically and splitting them into columns).

Another step forward would be ensuring that functionality within Bedpost matches up with what users actually need — there are unnecessary things present like the Mattress Removal button, Reassign All Shipments button, and having the option to edit shipments after they’ve already been batched; actions that are viewed as unreliable, such as Hold For Arrival and releasing White Glove Delivery slots; and needed features that are not available, like an Auto-Assign Shipments page, and a way to quickly and reliably view inventory levels by warehouse.

I hope that even after I leave Casper at the end of this summer 😢, our tech team will be able to make use of this qualitative data and continue to fight for the user-friendliness of Bedpost and other internal tools. I found myself trying to strike the right balance between aesthetic value and functionality a lot this summer, and I’ve learned that though perfect type and sleek motion design might not be attainable and/or necessary for a back-end tool, having effective information hierarchy and intuitive features makes all the difference in making someone’s job and life easier. Long dropdown menus, disorganized lists, and unclear functions begin to take a real toll on important workflows over time.

If you’re considering applying to Casper’s internship program and helping others dream their way to better lives, please feel free to contact me with any questions you may have about my experience, or check out our jobs board here: https://casper.com/jobs/.

Synthesizing UX research for an internal tool at Casper 😴 🛏 💤 was originally published in The Casper Tech Blog: Z++ on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

I also found that some of my users were not in my targeted audience: one of them told me that they would probably not use my website, not because it was bad, but because they just were not the type of person who wanted or needed to find events or fun things to do on the weekend. However, that person was still able to give me great feedback, because they were very technologically savvy and thus could pinpoint what parts of my app were not conforming to standard conventions.

We can use MVPs as a way to prioritize and guide our design processes and ensure that what we are creating is doing what it set out to do. At the end of the day, this is what matters most, the solution to the problem, the fulfillment of the need, the space for opportunity.

This idea was especially helpful for my project, as I may have been wrestling with too many features. I need to keep the goal, what makes my idea my idea, at the forefront of my mind: being able to select an event to attend. I may have been getting too overexcited with all the filters and preferences I was going to enable as features. I know now that figuring out what is most important needs to go first, and none of the extra stuff matters if what’s at the core isn’t working.

This is also where task analysis comes in. First it’s the task: the overarching goal that the user needs to accomplish. We’re high up on the ladder right now. Maybe it’s creating an account, or maybe it’s sending a message. Then comes the user flow. How do they get from A to B? In the creating an account example, they open the app, select ‘create an account,’ and pick a username and password. Finally, task analysis. This is where we get super refined. This is hi-fi. First, they have to decide they want to create an account. Then they locate this app on their phone. Then they open the app. Etc.

Utilizing wireframes and task analysis is the next step in building and visualizing my product. I’m looking forward to this process, as I’ll finally begin to get an idea for what it’ll look like outside of my head.

The exercise in which we did a feature comparison of the Free People and Nordstrom website landing pages was really eye-opening. A, I never realized just how many features a seemingly minimal homepage could have, and B, realizing that these websites have different goals (Free People being much more image-based and Nordstrom being more selling-based) made me understand the differences in their decisions with what features to include, where, and how.

The phrase “avoid reinventing the wheel” stuck with me. It makes sense: why would you re-do something that is standard, when it can be done for you? The part that matters is the point where you can rise above the rest.

Think of a horizontal spiral. It starts out wide. As it gets longer, the spiral becomes thinner and thinner. As is everything else in the iterations of UX, this spiral’s steady refinement is reflected in the creation of a persona. We gather big data from our research, categorize them within affinity diagrams, and draw conclusions about our users.

These affinity maps are useful for consolidating findings about user behavior and drawing out common themes. It took me a little bit to understand the process, particularly the bit in which you use one sentence to summarize a set of behaviors. However, once I did, I found the visual setup of affinity maps — using sticky notes on a board — helpful. It enabled me to literally see the kinds of conclusions I should be drawing from my research, and be able to consolidate these conclusions into a unified persona. It’s really interesting to see how you can draw so much from people’s surface-level behaviors to uncover something much subtler.

Asking the right questions is an integral part of interviewing in user research. I found it fascinating how altering certain words or phrasing in questions could lead to completely more open, whole answers from the user. For example, instead of asking something like “Do you think sending photos over social media to friends and family leads to feeling more interconnected within your social network?” which might lead to “Yeah, sure,” a more open-ended question like “How does sending photos over social media to friends and family impact your relationships with them?” is much more likely to invoke an answer requiring thought and careful consideration. Which will then provide invaluable insight.

Designing experiences is futile without real-world evidence. This evidence is what we use to fuel our decisions, build our products, and validate our work.

What I didn’t know was that design is about function, and UX about problem solving. I didn’t know that UX could encompass user research, product design, graphic and visual design, information architecture, usability, and prototyping. I didn’t know that a practice I thought was just about making things look nice could harness the power to engage consumer behavior, leverage businesses and corporations, and make everyday life easier.

Design is everywhere. We often don’t think about how things are designed because we are so used to taking them for granted. But every functional item, physical or virtual, was built with the intention to fulfill a need or problem. Designers strive towards purpose. They use facts to uphold their choices and are never subjective in the way they think. It is so much more than about what the button looks like.