Defined the core user needs for entertainment through foundational research, creating a strategic JTBD framework that now guides all new content and commerce initiatives.
UX Research
JTBD Research
Survey
Company
Zalando
Project Duration
Oct'23 - Dec'23
Role
UX Researcher
Overview
At Zalando, we were strategically focused on moving beyond a purely transactional experience to combine content with commerce. While many different teams and initiatives explored this space, they lacked a shared, structured way of understanding what 'entertainment' meant to our customers.
Research Approach
We led the foundational research to address this ambiguity. We needed to build a shared understanding of what entertainment truly meant to our customers, define their emotional needs, and create a framework that teams could use to evaluate and test their ideas against.
To accomplish this, we designed and ran an exploratory diary study. This was a multi-day research effort where participants documented how they perceived and experienced entertainment in their daily lives. The goal was to define the 'Jobs To Be Done' (JTBD) for our customers' emotional needs. We dug into their habits and motivations to find actionable user goals that we could then use to prioritize development.
Impact
Our research provided the entire organization with a shared mental model of what entertainment meant to our customers. This allowed us to define a clear JTBD framework, which became the foundational block for testing all new initiatives. For the first time, product teams could measure if their ideas truly met a user need, instead of just relying on engagement metrics.
This directly influenced our product roadmap by helping teams prioritize development based on user goals, ensuring we were building experiences that genuinely resonated with our audience.
Team
2 x User Researcher
3 x Co-Researchers (field phase)
My Learnings & Reflections
We discovered that the initial JTBD framework, as it was defined, was too granular for the teams' current projects.
After presenting to stakeholders, we took a step back and reworded our storytelling. We moved a level up from specific jobs to focus on the core user needs and how those needs linked to the mental states our participants wanted to achieve.
This new storytelling approach was highly effective. Content teams adopted our structured way of looking at entertainment, which they then used in different content experiments to work with an enhanced understanding of the user.
