“Dear Deer“ - A Project on Option Paralysis (IDEO U)

Background

Our team had a long-time hunch that learners experience option paralysis when comparing courses. This project set out to:

1) Confirm or deny if that hunch is true

2) To learn more about new user mindsets and journey as we take on 2021 new user goals

3) To uncover 2-3 new experiment hypotheses to test for alleviating uncovered pain points

Methodology

This project focused on new users and the homepage. We assumed that without brand familiarity, new users experience option paralysis at a greater scale than returning users. As the highest trafficked page on our site, we wanted to gather more information on how new users experience this page.

We kicked off this project with desk research, turning to Google Analytics to learn about new users and how they interact with the homepage. To set the stage for industry context and inspire our design activities, we did a competitive analysis across seven competitors.

Next, we created screener criteria and asked five new users on usertesting.com to navigate through our site, particularly on the homepage, and talk aloud their impressions and pain points. This uncovered five clear insights and helped set up what to ask in our discussion guide for our new users interviews.

To gather hunches and difference perspectives from within our business, we did an internal audit with six team members holding six different parts of the business. Six Insights about what would be helpful to focus this project on surfaced from this audit.

Working with our Chief of Staff, we screened and scheduled four new prospective learner interviews. We designed our sessions to include two main activities: 1) a closed card sort on Trello to determine hierarchy and preferences for certain homepage sections, and 2) usability testing on both the homepage and course quiz assessment tool.

Synthesis

As we pieced together the data, the scope of our project shifted. Our original project brief was thinking of the potential option paralysis to happen in the convergent phase of choosing the specific course they wanted while already on the website. As we started diving into research though with an emphasis on new users who are unfamiliar with IDEO U, we started to see that many of the potential paralysis moments were actually happening in the first convergent moment of a double diamond model. In other words, new learners kept getting stuck early in the journey when trying to first orient themselves to who we even are.

In our synthesis, it started making most sense to us to communicate our findings through the metaphor of applying and going to a university. We asked the stakeholders at our presentation to think about the process of finding the best college for you. There may be a college counselor you talk to to learn initially about the school, perhaps you could go on a campus tour, read a brochure, attend info sessions, or even sit in on a class. All of these steps happen before making the big decision to apply to a college and then once there, talk to an academic advisor to select specific courses for your first semester.

A very similar experience was happening here with new learners. In other words, the research showed that we were missing the campus tour and info session that pitched why IDEO U was right for them, before new users were even at the point of finding the specific course for them.

Outcomes & Next Steps

We came away with five concrete implement now recommendations, and 12 experiment ideas, with 5 of those ideas highlighted and scoped. We are currently building the experiments and implementing the five recommendations. Results and impact will be updated as soon as possible.