The what

In the Summer of 2022 I paired up with Kat, one of our rock-star Product Managers at Verblio, to conduct a round of discovery user interviews with writers. We focused on the writer-customer relationship, from the writer’s POV. We dug into the best and worst parts of working with customers, what it’s like to interpret customer briefs, and how the writer’s general experience with Verblio was going. We did not go into this research with one project in mind, but rather to uncover all sorts of research goodies that we didn’t even realize were out there. Inspired by the variety and contrast of writer opinions, I put together a survey to dig in further and see how a larger group of writers would measure up compared to our interview set.

As Verblio continued to grow, a lot was changing at the company. The startup had previously been able to tailor the experience to each writer or customer’s tastes. However, a company can only sustain such flexibility for so long before they must decide which direction they want to grow. Verblio had hit this crossroad and it was time to start thinking about what experience we would provide for our writers and customers moving forward.

We began our research by filling out our pre-research worksheet. I created this worksheet as a tool for our team to ensure we approached our research projects with a clear goal in mind. We’d use this goal as our Northern star to dictate which methods and what audience would be most appropriate.

Next, we crafted our interview script. Since this was a broad discovery round of research, we touched on multiple topics with open-ended questions.

We selected five participants for this round of interviews. We aimed to have participant variety in time writing for Verblio, writer level, and age.

User interview results

After we completed the interviews, I created an affinity map to identify trends. The most common themes that emerged were:

• Writers woud like more specific feedback from customers

• Writers were frustrated when multiple people from a business or agency would provide feedback, but that feedback was conflicting

• Writers do not highly value SEO within their own writing - it’s ‘just something we have to do’

• Writers avoid topics that are not easily recyclable

• Writers wish customers purchased content faster

I also found topics where our interview participants were a ‘house divided’.

• Blocking: Some participants adamantly wanted the ability to block customers, while some did not feel that feature would add anything.

• Voice: Some participants were ok with changing their ‘voice’ to meet customer needs; others felt this went against their creative expertise.

Survey

After we concluded our interviews, I became curious about how a larger set of writers would respond to our questions. Would any surprises unfold if we looked at these topics from a quantitative lens rather than a qualitative lens? I used the original interview script as a starting point for the survey script. I would ask the same questions, but would use the answers we had received during interviews as the answer options, rather than collecting all open-ended responses.

Survey results

The survey results were rife with interesting data! Some stats supported theories we previously held, others took us completely by surprise. Interestingly, when I looked at our ‘house divided’ topics of blocking and voice, I found that writers leaned strongly in one direction rather than being split.

Reflection

This project was a great example of how well qualitative and quantitative methods work together. Since this project was more exploratory, it was great to begin with a few interviews focusing on open-ended questions. This allowed us to dig into what the writers felt was important, without pushing ideas on them. Once we had collected such a rich depth of information, performing a survey was an excellent way to test themes that had emerged during the interviews.