Cathy Wang's Portfolio

The Dots | Soho Works

Using UX Research to build Soho Works an award winning professional networking app

Through discovery interviews and usability testing, we built a 2 time Lovie award winning app that has 72% of members remain active, outperforming LinkedIn’s monthly activity of 35%.

Skills:

User Research

Team:
User Researcher (me)
Product Designer: Raquel Sacristán Risueño

The Dots | Soho Works

Using UX Research to build Soho Works an award winning professional networking app

Through discovery interviews and usability testing, we built a 2 time Lovie award winning app that has 72% of members remain active, outperforming LinkedIn’s monthly activity of 35%.

Skills:

User Research

Team:
User Researcher (me)
Product Designer: Raquel Sacristán Risueño

The Dots | Soho Works

Using UX Research to build Soho Works an award winning professional networking app

Through discovery interviews and usability testing, we built a 2 time Lovie award winning app that has 72% of members remain active, outperforming LinkedIn’s monthly activity of 35%.

Skills:

User Research

Team:
User Researcher (me)
Product Designer: Raquel Sacristán Risueño

Introduction

The – Dots, a professional networking platform with over 1 million users, was exploring a new business model. We would create a white-label version of The – Dots app so businesses would have somewhere to host their private communities.

Soho Works, a London co-working space, became the first client to license the app. They wanted a better digital solution to connect its members as the existing app was not well liked by the community.

Introduction

Goal: Address pain points of noticeboard to help members network

Our goal was to build a private digital community for Soho Works, enabling members to network and communicate, addressing the limitations of their existing noticeboard.

We wanted to make sure members have a positive experience with our new app and engage with it.

It was fundamental that Soho Works was a success, as it would help prove the feasibility of our new business model.

As a UX researcher, it was my responsibility to research how we could deliver that value and to ensure users have a positive app experience.

Our goal was to build a private digital community for Soho Works, enabling members to network and communicate, addressing the limitations of their existing noticeboard.

As a UX researcher, it was my responsibility to research how we could deliver that value and to ensure users have a positive app experience.

Our goal was to build a private digital community for Soho Works, enabling members to network and communicate, addressing the limitations of their existing noticeboard.

As a UX researcher, it was my responsibility to research how we could deliver that value and to ensure users have a positive app experience.

Methodology

I broke down this project into two halves:

Discovery interviews
I would conduct discovery interviews to understand the goals, jobs to be done, and pain points of Soho Works members. I would also investigate why the current noticeboard was poorly received. This would give us an understanding of how we can deliver value and avoid the pitfalls of the noticeboard.

Usability testing
I would then conduct usability testing once we had a working prototype of the app to ensure all user flows are working as expected and to improve upon any snags before the app launch.

Methodology

I broke down this project into two halves:

Methodology

I broke down this project into two halves:

Discovery interviews

I wrote the interview script, arranged and led 9 interviews with Soho Works members, and used Dovetail to qualitatively code the recordings into themes to uncover insights.

Goals

Seniors were focused on developing their businesses
Mid/Juniors were focused on developing their careers

Jobs to be done

Networking was important for both personas but for different reasons

Seniors wanted to mentor as a way of giving back to their community
Mids/juniors wanted a mentor to help guide their career

Pain points

Both personas felt that:

The noticeboard didn’t feel like a community
Noticeboard was not useful:
- Posts get no replies
- Posts are not relevant to their professional lives

Goals

Seniors were focused on developing their businesses
Mid/Juniors were focused on developing their careers

Jobs to be done

Networking was important for both personas but for different reasons

Seniors wanted to mentor as a way of giving back to their community
Mids/juniors wanted a mentor to help guide their career

Pain points

Both personas felt that:

The noticeboard didn’t feel like a community
Noticeboard was not useful:
- Posts get no replies
- Posts are not relevant to their professional lives

Goals

Seniors were focused on developing their businesses
Mid/Juniors were focused on developing their careers

Jobs to be done

Networking was important for both personas but for different reasons

Seniors wanted to mentor as a way of giving back to their community
Mids/juniors wanted a mentor to help guide their career

Pain points

Both personas felt that:

The noticeboard didn’t feel like a community
Noticeboard was not useful:
- Posts get no replies
- Posts are not relevant to their professional lives

As both personas have goals and jobs to be done focused on networking and business/career development, it suggests the value proposition for the app could centre on helping Soho Works members professionally network with one another. This would address the pain points of the noticeboard lacking a sense of community and irrelevance to members professional lives.

With these insights, our CEO and Head of Product created the scope of features that would be in the MVP.

MVP features:

The ability to connect with other members
Attending community events
A forum where members can post questions for support

With these insights, our CEO and Head of Product created the scope of features that would be in the MVP.

MVP features:

The ability to connect with other members
Attending community events
A forum where members can post questions for support

With these insights, our CEO and Head of Product created the scope of features that would be in the MVP.

MVP features:

The ability to connect with other members
Attending community events
A forum where members can post questions for support

Usability testing

Once we had a working prototype, I conducted usability testing on key flows to ensure members could complete key tasks without any major issues.

I used Monzo’s Behavioural Analysis Matrix as a framework for evaluating our flows. This allowed us to focus on whether users were able to successfully complete the flow rather than the subjective feedback that can come out of usability testing.

I recruited 5 Soho Works members to conduct usability testing with and handled all research operations to enable the testing.

80% of members able to complete all flows

Overall, 80% of members were able to complete all flows successfully, which helped raise our confidence that there weren’t any serious blockers in the user flows that we had tested.

Participant 2 was the only participant that was unable to complete the full set of tasks:

They struggled to get through onboarding as they couldn’t figure out how to create a company page (the button looked like a tag).
They were unable to edit their profile as they didn’t recognise the edit icon.

It was decided by the product team that the usability issues participant 2 experienced would be monitored and updates would be made if more users struggled with the same issues.

Usability testing results

Attitudinal findings

What was most interesting about the usability testing for me was actually the attitudinal feedback from members. While Monzo’s Behavioural Analysis Matrix is supposed to focus on people’s behaviours and not their opinions, there were attitudinal insights that emerged from the testing which were worth capturing and discussing.

Insight 1: Swiping to connect feels like dating

During the onboarding flow, users are shown other member profiles and are invited to connect with others by swiping. 5/5 members said the interaction pattern felt intense and unexpected, they did not anticipate a dating app interface on a professional networking app. They also wanted more information on the card to justify connecting with someone.

Insight 2: Networking is very personal, people prefer doing this in private, not on a forum

3/5 members asked if it were possible to directly message the person they wanted to speak to, rather than posting their response on a public forum. Members mentioned that they valued being able to network in private, and felt uncomfortable to post or respond in a public manner.

In light of the feedback that emerged from the usability testing, the product team and CEO prioritised the changes to be actioned before the release of the app.

Changes included:

Adding a ‘Direct message’ button on posts so users can network in private
Adding more information to the cards on the connections swiper
Ability to edit and delete comments
Removing ‘Show all’ button on posts so users can see all replies at once
Ability to tag other members in comments
Ability to filter events by location

Impact

The white-label app has launched successfully with Soho Works and is being used by over 40 clients, including Apple Made for Business, Dazed, Frieze and 180 Studios to host their communities.

App metrics:

87% of members invited to join go on to sign up
72% of members remain active, outperforming LinkedIn’s monthly activity of 35%
46% of active members engage with other members monthly

The app also won two Lovie awards in the General-Work & Productivity category.

Learnings

Monzo's behavioural analysis matrix article says:
"Focus on what people do and not on what they say. That's because people's opinions can change all the time… Behaviours, on the other hand, tend to be fairly consistent"

While it's true that you shouldn't change a design just because someone doesn't like it, this experience taught me that it’s okay to consider attitudinal data in usability testing and make changes based on it, as long as there’s solid evidence to support those decisions.

If I could go back and run this project again, I would have liked to run a quantitative study with Soho Works members to understand if the attitudinal data from the usability testing would translate on a large scale.

Learnings

Next project

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