☝️ Prioritizing User and Business Requirements
Interest-based communities flock to Mercari, where 250K+ new listings are posted every day. As an effort to grow these community spaces, Mercari launched numerous community building features throughout 2023-2024. To help prioritize which features to pursue, I conducted a MaxDiff survey with Mercari customers and collaborated with business leaders to evaluate how the team can create the most value in a roadmap.
👩🏻💼 My Role
Senior UX Researcher
🥅 Project Goals
Incorporate customer voice into product feature prioritization.
💭 Methods
Anchored MaxDiff Survey
🗓️ Duration
3 weeks (2024)
📈 Impact
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Shaped Community's team roadmap to rebalance business requirements with user needs
Context
This project was for Mercari, a digital resale marketplace. The company launched a project to build interest-based community spaces on the platform.
The Problem
Business leaders prioritized a list of features related to community building on Mercari that they believed would provide the most monetary value for the company. However, no customer input was included nor considered in this prioritization.
I stepped in and proposed we obtain our customers' point of view to understand how their prioritization may vary or align with what the business proposed.
Project Goals:
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Understand Mercari users’ perceived relative prioritization of community feature use cases to drive modifications to business prioritizations, as necessary.
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Create a product-feature roadmap to build communities on the platform.
Key Research Questions:
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How do Mercari users prioritize each community use case relative to one another?
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Which community use cases are desirable or undesirable?
My Approach
Stakeholder Interviews
1 week
Survey
2 weeks
Impact
1. Stakeholder Interviews
To start off, I spent some time with primary stakeholders in Product Management, Business Intelligence, and Content to understand their initial approach to the project.
Output
Informed research direction and timelines, aligning on:
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Expectations behind each feature
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Rationale behind business prioritization
💡Key Learnings
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Multiple features were getting at the same expected use case and could be consolidated.
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Many features were not grounded in a user problem or user need.
2. Survey
After editing the product feature list into a more concise list of use cases, I built out an anchored MaxDiff survey in Qualtrics to send out to existing Mercari customers. I chose this methodology to obtain a quick, relative prioritization of the use cases.
Output
Graphs across various cohorts breaking down the:
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Preference share: the likelihood that each use case is the most preferred item
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Average feature utility: the relative preference of each item, used to determine the magnitude of difference in desirability of each item
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Total unduplicated reach and frequency (TURF): top 5 use cases that span the largest portion of market desires
💡Key Learnings
Thematically...
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The least preferred use cases were related to engaging with a community on Mercari, contrary to stakeholder expectations
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The most preferred use cases were related to discovering items and ensuring they were authentic
📈 Impact
As a result, the Community's team roadmap shifted to rebalance business requirements with user needs. However, I am unable to report any further impact metrics as I left before other metrics were known.
💭 Reflections
👍 What went well
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Stakeholder buy-in to receive user feedback before solidifying a roadmap
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Survey results demonstrated how differently customers prioritized use cases in comparison to internal employees
👎 Missed opportunities
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Due to compressed timelines, further investigation into the use cases could not be done