Project CORA // Surveys & Ethnography

Project Overview

Client: CORAbot: A Community Operations Resource Agent enabling local help

What they do: Grassroots community helper tool developed by Microsoft volunteers bridges the gap between those in need and those with resources

Role: Lead UX Researcher

Problems/Goals:

  • Limited understanding of the average user’s perceptions of bots and potential users for this specific bot

  • Need a comprehensive user research guide documenting steps of UX research process and findings

  • Need brand identity, including: logo design, purpose statement & accompanying creative copy, style guide

  • Need a website to coincide with launch of the product and be the focal point for the call to action

How I helped:

  • Lead user research by designing online surveys to study how the average citizen perceives bots (also known as: virtual agents) and how they would engage with a bot like CORAbot, conducting focus groups to study how potential users would interact with a product like CORAbot and its website, and hosted usability tests to see how users maneuvered throughout the CORA products.

  • Conducted competitive and market analyses to gauge public opinion and success rates of products similar to CORA

  • Crafted a client-facing, comprehensive user research guide that documented all the above processes and findings

  • Consulted with the design of the preliminary, low-fidelity wireframes for the CORAbot website

  • Worked with design team to put together a style guide outlining CORA’s brand identity, including visual samples from the website and bot messages

  • Aided in the creation of creative copy necessary for brand identity

Project Guidelines

I helped out with this project through my work with Boston University Spark! and Microsoft, which started with their Resiliency Challenge Hackathon. Because this consultation began with a hackathon, the guidelines or “requirements” for the project were flexible and self-imposed. Our team decided in the beginning of the Challenge that the following guidelines were necessary for the success of each deliverable.

User Research Guide:

To gain a better understanding of our target users’ needs and to keep track of all our findings, our team put together a User Research Guide. This guide includes the following:

  1. Online Survey

  2. Focus Groups

  3. Usability Tests

  4. Competitive Analysis & Market Research

Deliverables

User Research Guide

The user research guide serves as a market research document as well as comprehensive portfolio of the user research conducted. As one of the UX Associates, I took lead on user research, and both created each individual study (the survey, focus group script, etc.) and wrote the client recommendations garnered from this research, all of which can be found in the guide linked below. (Design work by: Kari Everson)