Case Study: How Hello Bar Applied Customer Research for Product Strategy

In 2016, I consulted on a UX research project for Hello Bar. I helped Hello Bar understand the motivations and needs of its users through the Jobs to be Done framework from Clayton Christensen, a Professor at Harvard Business School.

What is Hello Bar?

Hello Bar is a free optimization tool for websites.

It is a simple notification bar that delivers customized messages, driving more clicks and conversions.

Role

My main contributing role was as a UX Researcher.

The Challenge

Understand the journey a user goes through from considering a solution to actually choosing Hello Bar.

Direct Outcome

The research intended to provide Hello Bar product leaders recommendations on how to:

1. resolve customer pain points,
2. increase retention, and
3. generate engagement.

What I did

Executed a one-week research sprint. During the sprint, I conducted 8+ interviews (the interviews ranged from 40 minutes to an hour), mapped out sign-up behavior, and identified gaps in the product to ensure retention and engagement.

Here’s How I Did It

1. Define Main Questions

The research addressed these questions:

• What are the motivations and needs of Hello Bar users?
• What is the journey of a user going from considering a solution to their problems to actually choosing Hello Bar?

I recruited 8 participants by sending out an email to Hello Bar users. I wanted to know the decision-making process from start to end.

Here’s a cheat sheet of the terms on the decision-making timeline based on the Jobs-to-be-Done framework:

• First Thought: What caused the first thought to think about making the purchase? When was it?
• Passively Looking: What did they do while they were passively looking? For how long?
• Event #1: What happened that switched them from passively to actively looking?
• Actively Looking: What did they do while they were actively looking?
• Event #2: What was the event that made him decide to make a purchase at a specific day/time?
• Deciding: What helped him make the purchase?

Analysis

I had a bunch of data from the interviews. There are a lot of different ways I could approach analyzing all of it. I did by leveraging 3 different frameworks:

1. Jobs-to-be-Done Stories
2. Four Forces
3. Nir Eyal’s Hooked Model

Here’s what we learned:

1. Jobs-to-be-done

After all of the interviews, I organized the information into the Jobs to be Done stories. Below is an excerpt and summary:

1) First Thought: What caused the first thought to think about signing up for Hello Bar? When was it?

• Mary started a jewelry website to sell jewelry at a reasonable price. She got it up and running through Shopify. To promote her site, she needed to collect emails and boost sales.

2) Passively Looking: What did she do while she was passively looking? For how long?

• Mary started looking for ways to boost sales and collect emails. She works on the online shop after work, at night. She started out posting on Facebook and Twitter, but knew she needed to find another way to advertise.

3) Event #1: What happened that switched Mary from passively to actively looking?

• Mary approached Shopify’s 24-hour customer service about advertising. The customer service rep recommended using the Hello Bar through Shopify’s App Store.

4) Actively Looking: What did Mary do while she was actively looking?

• Mary browsed the Shopify Apps store to figure out what would work best. She narrowed it down to Coupon Pop and Hello Bar.

5) Event #2: What was the event that made her decide to make a purchase at a specific day/time?

• Mary played around with the Coupon Pop and Hello Bar. She considered Coupon Pop which lets her create a pop-up ad. Based on Shopify’s recommendation, she also tried Hello Bar.

6) Deciding: What helped her make the purchase?

• Mary liked Hello Bar more than Coupon Pop because it stays at the top. It is a constant reminder for her users. She likes how it is static. Coupon Pop on the other hand allows Mary’s site visitors to close pop-up ad. In contrast to Coupon Pop, Hello Bar sits nicely at the top so that she can promote the free shipping on her site. Mary has only used it for a few weeks, she is happy with it. There are some issues of figuring out how to change the Hello Bar, she wants to learn how to change it.

2. Four Forces

The four forces framework defines the push and pull of the situation. The situation in this case was using the product Hello Bar. This diagram helps explain and visualize:

• Habit of the present — what you already do
• Anxiety of the new — why you are hesitant to use this product
• Push of the situation — what motivates you to try the product
• Magnetism of the new — what attracts me to the product

If you want to learn more about using the four forces diagram, here is a link and helpful website that talks a lot about the Jobs to be Done framework.

Applying the framework, here’s what I learned from Hello Bar user:

• What users already do: Hello Bar users have a way on their website to encourage users to Subscribe to updates or newsletters so they can collect emails.
• Why you are hesitant to use this product: Hello Bar users were anxious about the Hello Bar being too big on mobile screens, competing with their website. They also felt Hello Bars were “not smart,” wishing for automation or a way to help users increase the number of conversions whether it’s increasing # of emails collected or increasing number of users who subscribe to their newsletter to build a following that they could communicate with.
• What motivates you to try the product: Hello Bar users were excited to experiment with new tools and saw how successful they were on bloggers’ websites. As a result, they wanted to replicate that same success on their own website.
• What attracts me to the product: A large chunk of Hello Bar users came to Hello Bar based on word-of-mouth: a recommendation from industry influencers such as Marie Forleo, Neil Patel, or a friend.

Here’s the analysis I pulled together to show it in an infographic format:

2. Nir Eyal’s Hooked Model

A successful product is something that we use every day. For instance, Facebook and Gmail are products that have become everyday behavior. The Hooked Model explains how products like these are so powerful they have become a part of our everyday lives.

• External triggers: Marie Forleo, Neil Patel, Kissmetrics blog, meet-ups, online forums and designers inspired users to try out Hello Bar on their sites.
• Internal triggers: Hello Bar users felt anxious — they felt the urge to grow their personal brand and engage with their audience in a tangible way.
• Investment: Installing a Hello Bar required minimal investment. With a few clicks, they could add it to their sites, change the colors and text, and boom, it’s installed and start seeing results instantly.
• Reward: They were excited to collect emails and get more followers. I scored it an eight because most users felt they successfully increased these success metrics in a meaningful way.
• Action: Hello Bar requires very little work: install the bar and boom: you start collecting emails and followers.

Recommendations & Results

Overall, I identified two main pain points and suggested recommendations to minimize them.

Pain Point #1: Users were hungry for step-by-step instructions on how to install Hello Bar onto their website. These users were not tech-savvy, they were DIY-ers who like to problem solve and try out new tools.

Recommendation #1: Reduce the pain point of installation for those who are not tech-savvy. Provide step-by-step instructions and/or FAQs page.

Users wanted instructions on how to install Hello-Bar and a place to get questions answered quickly.

Actioned item: The team at Hello Bar added 18+ How-to-install-Hello-Bar and 12+ FAQ articles.

Pain Point #2: The common pain point across all interviewees was people forgot to change their Hello Bar. They forget to check into their dashboard.

Recommendation #2: Based on this finding, I recommended an email notification system to drive retention and engagement.

Actioned Item: As a result, users can now select the option to receive a weekly email showing performance metrics. Here’s what it looks like on the Hello Bar site. This action increased engagement significantly across the user base.

Conclusion

These Jobs-to-be-Done framework and Hooked model from Clayton Christensen and Nir Eyal were helpful in taking the customer feedback and synthesize the data into a structural framework.

The leadership team at Hello Bar executed these recommendations quickly and efficiently. This type of action and execution on UX Research is not always the case at tech companies. Sometimes research data will sit, and the R&D teams might not act on it for various reasons: backlog of features, limited capacity, and etc.

As a result, UX Researchers and Designers are often faced with this challenge. How might we make UX Research reports even more tangible, actionable, and relatable? How might we sell the findings to your internal stakeholders? How might we instill urgency and fortitude into the team to inspire action?