Delicious

Project Details

Phase 1: Marketing and Business Assessment

This phase formed the business context for the project and thus helped us to develop the design for the listening labs in Phase 2.

Steps included:

• Corporate strategy review. As a first step in building the business context for the project, Creative Good reviewed del.icio.us's corporate and ebusiness strategy, as well as past and present Web-based initiatives.
• Internal stakeholder analysis. Because the organizational and cultural challenges are often the biggest barriers to change, Creative Good interviewed key stakeholders and managers to assess the organizational perspective and uncover critical viewpoints and internal challenges.
• Marketing and customer review. Creative Good reviewed market research already conducted, and any other needs assessment or customer segmentation analysis.
• Expert review. Creative Good conducted an expert heuristic analysis on the current process and evaluted competitor strengths and weaknesses.
• Performance and usage metrics. Creative Good analyzed current site performance, usage metrics and other behavioral data.
• Listening lab setup. Creative Good conducted the preparations for the listening labs. This included reviewing customer segmentation, creating a screener, creating the lab design, scheduling the facility and recruiters, and identifying key stakeholders to invite to attend.

Phase 2: Listening Labs

Creative Good's version of user tests, listening labs combine the best of traditional usability research and less directive market research methods.

• 8 users who had never used del.icio.us participated in one-on-one sessions, each lasting 45 minutes, followed by a discussion among the client team members observing from "behind the glass."
• 8 current del.icio.us users participated in a separate day of one-on-one sessions, also observed by client stakeholders.
• Analysis of the lab results showed, as it often does, the "why" of the Phase 1 analysis. User behavior we observed in the listening labs clearly showed why del.icio.us was difficult to start using (for non-techies) and even, in some cases, for current users of the service.

Phase 3: Creation of the Customer Experience Strategy

Creative Good developed a simple high-level strategy to guide the rest of the redesign project, based on everything that had come before in the project: business analysis and expert review, stakeholder interviews, data analysis, listening lab results.

Phase 4: Prototyping

Creative Good created around 15 pages of "wireframe" prototypes to show, tactically, how to implement the customer experience strategy in the redesign.

The project finished in early 2006.