Year 2017-2018
Tools and methods: In-depth interview, Video ethnography, Consumer personas, Service blueprints, Desk research
Company: EF 360 Innovation
Field Location: Shanghai, Chengdu, Beijing, Shenzhen, Nanjing
Team: Monika Hanson, Adrian Constantin, Keran Yang, Isaac Li, Molly Cai
Background
EF 360 is an innovation incubator inside EF focusing on tech triggered innovation trend such as AI and ML. China is advanced in language learning product innovation empowered with AI. With the new chief innovation officer onboard, the central research team is requested to scrutinize into the innovation trend of Ed-tech industry, with a focus on the market landscape mapping analysis in China.
My Role
As the research lead, my role includes define scope, data analysis to discover the research hypothesis, planning, recruiting and conducting ethnography. The project deliveries were product trend report, user personas and consumer journey mapping and workshops with senior stakeholders, content team, marketing team and product design team.
Research Process
The project has 3 objectives, 1) discovering trends in the E-learning adult market 2) mapping out market landscape in the sector 3) looking into current consumer personas and journey mapping to identify the potential product opportunities.
With an objective to identify the new Ed-tech trends and evolution of market development in China, we chose an approach of competitors analysis. The tech trend shows the mobile learning has taken over the e-learning market covering a spread of user motivations. In each market segmentation, we found out some anchor products and this help us to see the big picture of the market trend in the future.
In order to understand the learning environment and lifestyle evolution of our target users, we chose to conduct the research at their real life environment with profiles covering both active and lapsed users.
The methods we use include home-visits, video ethnography and user interview. One of the pain points of our users is to have too many devices and platforms without a centralized product experience.
With the tools of personas and user journey, we’ve brought the unmet needs of user groups, gaps of user flow back to life, and run Ideation workshops with different teams to come up with new ideas. We successfully leveraged user insights to potential business opportunities.
