Research to Roadmap: Perceptions of importance and satisfaction

Understanding the obstacles users face in completing their tasks is essential for product developers seeking to make meaningful improvements. Recognizing these roadblocks and understanding where they occur in the user journey can provide valuable insights.

One effective method for gaining this understanding is by employing a Job Map. This approach, advocated by Tony Ulwick, shifts the focus from simply outlining user actions to delving into what users are striving to achieve. This needs-focused perspective can reveal deeper insights into user behavior and needs.

The Job Map framework breaks down any task into eight distinct steps: defining, locating, preparing, confirming, executing, monitoring, modifying, and concluding. Analyzing tasks through these steps can help uncover user needs and pain points at each stage.

In my role at a fintech startup, I applied this framework to understand the experiences of financial advisors. By breaking down their tasks into the eight stages and conducting user interviews, we assessed each stage's satisfaction and importance. This analysis revealed key pain points where the importance of a stage outweighed user satisfaction, guiding our focus for future improvements.

For our qualitative-quantitative research, we asked advisors to rate each step from 1 to 10 in terms of satisfaction and importance. For example, we might ask:

"Considering your overall process as a financial advisor, could you rate these steps?

a. From 1 to 10: How satisfied are you with how you currently conduct this step?

b. From 1 to 10: How important do you feel this step is?"

By conducting this exercise with a significant number of users, we identified steps where there was a high contrast between satisfaction and importance ratings. Steps with high importance and low satisfaction highlighted the most prominent pain points, indicating areas for potential improvement.

Our goal as product developers is to redesign these experiences to add real user value. Here is the canvas we used after co-defining the eight steps with our users.