Discovery
The team at My Art Broker had a close relationship with their users and customers, but they had never done any user research before. 


They were right at the beginning of their discovery process so it was my job to guide the through this. This was challenging because no one in the company or team had been through this process before.
Kick off workshop
I started the process by running a kick off workshop to capture the existing knowledge of the team about their users, to understand who we would recruit for this first round of research and to pull together a set of hypotheses to test.
Creating a research plan
Once I had run the kick off workshop I ran a follow up research plan workshop to set the objectives, research questions and finalise the participants we would recruit for this first round of research.
From the first workshop I was able to put together a discussion guide and we used this session to refine this and agree on the structure of the interviews.
Conducting the interviews
I then ran a series of user interviews with the user groups we had agreed on.
My approach is to start with a smaller number of users for the first round of user research (with around 5/6 users), iterate and then do a further two rounds, iterating each time. This is based on large discovery studies being expensive and taking a long time to run and it also allows the team to make incremental improvements quickly. This is inspired by Neilson Norman thinking.
The user interviews went very well and I was then able to take this into the analysis phase.
Mapping the research data
I then spent time mapping the research interview data into a service map based on the categories/areas that that team wanted to discover. This was a very broad overview of the user experience from their motivations for buying art, their experience of the wider industry to their experience using My Art Broker specifically and their reaction to new concept ideas the team had.
We also ran a quantitative survey which I was able to supplement the journey map with.
Playing back the first round of results
From the journey mapping I was able to create a report to play back to the CEO/ Founder and Managing director.
This included:
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Overview of the research done
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Key findings
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Key pain points
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Critical success factors
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User Research results
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General art buying experience
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User Experience using MAB
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Concepts/new ideas tested
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Recommendations for the next round of research
Recommendations for next steps and further rounds of research
My recommendations focused around the key themes I had observed from the research, but also feedback on the concepts they wanted to take forward and how best to approach this.
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I also included suggestions for how to approach the next round of research.
Feedback & Impact
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"Just finished watching both interviews. Absolutely fascinating!! Thank you! We’re working through the findings from work, you got us into a really great discipline so thank you! We’d love to be back in touch when we need more from you.”
Managing Director
My Art Broker