Wedding Planning Research

Problems

Bridestory is a wedding marketplace that helps connect wedding professionals and vendors with brides-to-be around the world. However, currently there is no baseline to get to know more about their targeted user, even though this is the fundamental requirement to have to build a product. So, to build a better experience, it is very important to start answer and understand the most basic question “who are our users? “

Research

Research Planning

In the early stages, we planned the research including define the research objectives, scope and what methods will be used.

Objective :
To validate buyer persona in order to gain more in depth understanding of Bridestory customers and use these findings to build a better customer experience both from product and business or across multiple divisions.
• What are the habits, behaviour, motivation, delighters and pain points
• What are the different types of buyers and how are they different?

Methodology : 
• Look at analytics or internal database and create a preliminary
• User interview

Research Process

Preliminary Data

When we started the research we didn’t know much about the Bridestory’s target audience. The first step was to understand the basics and nothing is more basic than demographics. We collecting datas and do quantitative analysis from internal data, including google analytics and internal databases. This stage aims to build an initial hypothesis on the persona classification in Bridestory. 

User Interview

Our first step is finding the right people to interview about wedding planning. The best audience is representative of our users from the initial hypothesis. We need to ask ourselves what we want to find out during these interviews and make a plan about what and who you are going to ask. Our participants should all be potential users or people who have an interest in the topic that our product will be based on. And in this research we finally have conducted interviews with :

7 Brides to be – 1 Groom to be – Couples and 3 Newlyweds

Ask the right questions. An interview guide is essentially a script for our interviews, so we make sure everything have planned. Generally, we ask the conversational question, easy to understand, and open-ended. We emphasis to asking “why” involves getting behind the scenes and looking at factors driving a person, beside just asking “how” and “what” questions. The main topics we asked are:

User demography • Technology used • Wedding planning process • Online wedding and experience in Bridestory

And in the last stage of the interview we make sure all processes are recorded properly. We re-listen the interview process and create the verbatim that can easily grab information and quotes from when we move on to affinity diagramming.

Analysis and findings

1. Finding themes and patterns

This is where we like to use an affinity map/diagram. This helped us to uncover key insights by grouping together information based on themes and patterns. With this in place, we had a better understanding about the needs of the target audience. My personal favorite tools for creating affinity maps- Miro.com.

2. Translate these findings into one or more personas
At the final stage we conclude the result by creating a persona. The things that we emphasize here include:

Goals – What does this person want to accomplish? When thinking about goal vs. motivation, a goal is the end result that they want to achieve.
Motivations – Think of motivation as the fuel and reasoning that drives the effort to complete a goal.
Frustrations or pain points – What are the users’ main complaints with their current journey? We are identifying these so that we can alleviate that stress with our future product.
Demographics – Age, location, gender. We want to find significant patterns in user behavior, not make biases, assumptions, and generalizations about a particular audience, with no basis in factual data.

Result

Final outcome — User Personas

The final step is to summarize all the insights. After user research, we had a clear understanding of what is the main target in Bridestory, what users expect from, what motivates them and what stops them — a lot of helpful information to consider when planning features improvements.

Wireframe of final outcome — User Persona dashboard

Affordable

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Moderate

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Luxurious

Learnings

The most challenging part of this project is happen during the COVID-19 pandemic and requires to do everything online. However, the collaboration between the team and also interview participants made the process done as we planned. And also remembering the objective of this research is very important because personas are the foundation on which we can build our product. Without them, it’s almost impossible to know how to message our product to talk to customers’ pain points and needs, or how to reach them to build awareness and drive them to our website. So, the key opportunities from personas we’ve made are :
• We have the baseline to do more deep dive analysis for further improvement
• Designs, new business or feature ideas should keep the personas in mind
• and keep searching for new opportunities!