Delving Deep into the First-Time Home Seeker Journey
The business problem: PropertyGuru [PG] wanted to increase empathy with home buyers, with the idea of “following the users” throughout their home purchase journey.
The challenge: Designing, conducting and activating 3-month diary research as a new hire - my first job since graduating from my Masters in Human-Computer Interaction.
Deliverables: Interim report; Final report; Company-wide Workshops —> Insights used in 2020 planning.
PG is an online property marketplace. Property seekers visit PG to browse listings and to contact agents to enquire further. The company’s view on property seekers is largely based on user behaviour within the site - quantitative in nature, centred only on website usage. As such, it was imperative that we opened this view to a deeper, qualitative view of home seekers to influence company direction, product decisions, marketing initiatives, as well as design needs.
Home Seeker User Journey. Company reference pre-project: based on previous quantitative research, scattershot qualitative research, and internal discussion.
Internal Info gathering
Understanding stakeholders: Upon joining PG, I conducted stakeholder interviews across the company, which acted as a self-introduction while helping me to understanding PG’s research needs. I treated this as a sub-piece of research, creating themes and research needs for my own reference. The stakeholder interviews also created buy-in across the company.
Defining research needs: The stakeholder interviews allowed me to boil down the research needs to: 1) understanding the post-information gathering stage of property purchase (i.e. Referring to the User Journey above: Compare —> Live), 2) digging deeper into exactly how decisions are made, and 3) understanding who (or where) seekers turn to for advice.
Navigating constraints: Property purchase is such an extended process that literally “following the user” across all 5 PG markets (Singapore, Malaysia, Thailand, Indonesia, Vietnam) would be extremely impractical. Similarly, such a high level of involvement would require much more human and monetary resources that were available (I was a one-man research team for the entire company). The act of balancing these constraints with the research needs led me to settle on a diary methodology, conducted over two months in Malaysia, towards the end of the property purchase journey. This plan was further validated with the key stakeholders in PG.
Mapping stakeholder needs. Affinity map in Google Sheets to focus the research.
High level research plan. Screenshot of the research design slide, presented to key stakeholders before kickoff.
Project Management
Recruitment. Due to limited budget, I initially did not use recruitment agencies. I set out to recruit n= 12 respondents from four different sources: 1) On-site screeners on Propertyguru.com.sg, 2) Consumer EDMs from PG, 3) notices on the Lowyat forums, and 4) posts on Facebook Malaysia property groups. Each source had various advantages and drawbacks. For example (3) and (4) necessitated dealing with trolls and low response rate, but often resulted in more engaged respondents. (1) and (2) had a higher response rate, but also had more dropouts. Due to business needs and project constraints, these were focussed primarily on Kuala Lumpur and Johor Bahru.
Dropouts. Midway through the project, n= 2 respondents dropped out. These respondents needed to be replaced because they represented a crucial, difficult to research segment in Malaysia. Due to limited time, I eventually asked for additional budget to use a recruitment agency to replace the two respondents.
Respondent Management. First contact was via email. Subsequent correspondence was via whatsapp, phone and shared Google Drive docs for the diaries.
Fieldwork + First Round Analysis
Fieldwork. I made three trips to Malaysia to conduct initial interviews, and then two trips to conduct the debriefing interviews. These five trips also coincided with showflat visits.
Supplementary data collection. Visits to Malaysia were not only to interview respondents, they were also taken as opportunities to further understand the Malaysia and its property market. This allowed me to understand first hand specific property conditions in Malaysia. For example, the cultural effects of transient migration on property choice and infrastructure. The visits were also used as opportunities to introduce myself to the Malaysian PG office.
Showflat visit. One of the respondents examining a showflat with the help of two of his friends.
Analysis + Reporting
Data recording + analysis. Audio recordings, diary entries, and photos were transcribed and analysed during fieldwork. This afforded me a deeper understanding of respondent behaviour to use as a basis for follow-up questions over the duration of fieldwork.
Interim report + Stakeholder Management. Since I was analysing on-the-go, I also presented an interim report to keep stakeholders abreast of the project, as well as a ‘test-run’ to understand if the direction of the project and the first round analysis was proving useful to the business needs and context. It also meant I could answer to any requests for an ‘elevator speech’.
Analysis + Reporting. This took a good deal of time. I started by consolidating the transcripts and notes into one place. Next, with the help of concurrent coding that took place over the project, I took the notes to a higher level of abstraction [findings; inferences]. These were consolidated in an affinity map on Miro board. With the ability to view the big picture, as well to zoom in to the details on Miro, I started to come up with insights for a final report.
Insights. At a very high level, these can be summarised as: property seekers change their search behaviour to be more targeted over time. However, this is not a linear process - with many stops and starts and u-turns along the way - moderated by personal context, motivation and knowledge. There is opportunity to elevate the property seeker-PG relationship by making it a two-way conversation, thus enhancing trust, increasing property knowledge, and boosting seeker confidence in their own decisions.
Affinity mapping. Findings were consolidated on Miro as an affinity map to help organise my thoughts.
User Journey. Screenshot from the final report, showcasing a summarised property purchase journey.
Workshops
Workshops. The project was never just meant for high level stakeholders. The entire company was to benefit directly from the research. After reporting, I conducted four workshops with working level stakeholders all across the company - such as product, marketing, engineering, data science, sales and design.
Activities. The workshops were intended to promote empathy to property seekers. As such, the majority of the workshop focussed on delving into user problems collectively. After a warm up exercise, participants were split into smaller groups to draw empathy maps of individual users, based on my notes and the user journey. Participants later reconvened to present and discuss each user and their problems. A summary of the workshop was sent to the participants within the same day.
Problem Statements. Together with the insights from the report, the workshops streamlined the findings into business problem statements that were aligned across the company. These were bucketed into 1) supplying information to home buyers 2) facilitating informed property decisions and 3) smoothening seeker-agent-finance relationships.
Workshops. Participants drew and presented empathy maps.
Outcomes + Reflection
Outcomes. The project was a success, with stakeholders across the company giving very positive feedback to the reporting and to the workshops. It also helped to establish the power of user research within the company - stakeholder requests for research increased greatly after the workshops. Finally, the findings from the research were used extensively in business planning for 2020.
Reflection. This project presented many firsts for me, not least of which running a study over a timeframe of 6 months (including preparation, fieldwork, analysis and workshopping) as a one-man team. I learnt to be resourceful in learning and adapting to new tools and requirements, while balancing between business constraints and the need for insightful research. This was also a first at running multiple workshops over time, with many cross-functional stakeholders. Some of the main things I’d learnt from the experience include: 1) being very strict in managing participants including internal stakeholders 2) improving my observational skills on-site, and 3) using my position as an in-house researcher to constantly feel out stakeholder needs - long after the scoping of the project had ended.