XYLA
User Research & MVP for Personality App
Overview
XYLA is an early stage start up founded by experts in business, marketing, psychology and product, in pursuit of uncovering how our personality types determine the success (or failure) of our friendships and relationships.
The team created a scientific method of collecting and sorting data using a personality survey for users to take. Once results are organized and codified, users are able to better understand their personality, what kinds of personalities mesh well with their own and what determines the “success” of a friendship or relationship.
Problem Statement
When I joined XYLA the team was preparing to meet with investors for the first time. Before that meeting took place, my goal was to build the MVP and tackle 3 challenges:
1
Identify and understand XYLA’s target audience and competitive landscape
2
Research and implement best practices in survey design to create an engaging questionnaire
3
Determine a way to visually map personality results of an individual and of multiple people
Users & Audience
After completing user interviews with people ranging in age, race, careers and economic status it was interesting to uncover that XYLA’s users transcend traditional target audience constraints. It became clear that XYLA’s main audience would people open to introspection and exploration, especially those in a transitionary period in their lives.
Illustrations by Pablo Stanley
Knowing this, I was able to design an MVP welcoming people of all demographics and backgrounds, which is a gap commonly found in the competition. For example, Buzzfeed quizzes reel in younger audiences looking to pass the time rather than truly learn about themselves while the Myers Briggs assessment appeals to a more serious crowd, willing to pay to learn more about themselves.
Roles & Responsibilities
The team was made up of 10 people. We had the CEO with an extensive business background, a psychologist and machine learning expert who worked together to create the survey and coding system, a software engineer, a marketing and product leader, a chief of staff, two brand experts and myself as the sole designer and researcher.
Scope & Constraints
Our time to finalize an MVP that depicted the survey flow and the visual mapping of the results was constrained by impending investor meeting. As the only UX designer, I felt the weight of having to advocate for the end user to the leadership team. XYLA is a bi-coastal company, which resulted in compromises with scheduling and given that the entirety of the project took place during COVID-19, all conversations and interactions were digital.
My Design Process
Step 1: Review project goals, scope and already completed work
To start off, I met the whole team via Zoom. Afterwards, I made a point of connecting with everyone individually, either by phone call or video conference, to introduce myself and to learn more about their role. It was important that we establish a common understanding of my goals and responsibilities as a UX designer and to learn of their story behind joining the project, as well as their own goals and responsibilities.
In return, I created and shared a Gantt chart of my deliverables to ensure visibility into my work and projected schedule.
As a designer, an early concern of mine was the length of the questionnaire - keeping people engaged with a quiz that is over 10 questions long is difficult, let alone 70!
My teammates expressed how the assessment’s length was a barrier to engaging users through to the end. However, reducing the number of questions was also challenging because it would compromise the scientific integrity of the survey, as explained by our team psychologist. In the end, convincing her to change the length proved futile so I decided to focus my energy on using the user interviews to research ways of making an engaging assessment without compromising the scientific length.