Note: This was an NDA project so specific details are swapped with pirate topics in this case study.
PROJECT OVERVIEW
Our quantitative team wanted to better understand the different types of pirates and their behaviors so that our company can provide tailored resources and support for the right pirate to achieve their goals.
CHALLENGES
We do not have a clear understanding of the end-to-end experience of pirates along their entire pirating life (from the day they become a pirate through ship changes or even death), which makes it hard to identify their behavior range. Additionally, It’s unclear the moments that matter for them and their perception of the tools our company provided.
MY ROLE & PARTNERS
I worked with a senior design strategist to co-author the scope and approach plan. We interviewed 16 pirates. I owned the data collection, synthesis, and developed the frameworks. I worked with a UX researcher to identify all the moments that mattered from our data. The strategist and I developed a set of archetypes and created different design concepts & mocks. We collaborated on identifying other partnering pirate ships in the ecosystem of piracy. I organized and created the visualization and content organization for everything you’ll see in this project. I was responsible for:
Research & synthesis
Pirate archetypes
Development of moments that matter framework
Data visualization and organization
Concept design mocks
PHASE 1 | DISCOVER
Interviews and data collection
First step toward creating archetypes: Collect data! We interviewed 16 pirates and organized our notes in Figjam. I implemented a color coding system so we could organize as we go.
Orange - Quotes
Yellow - Observations
Red - Surprises
Green - Highlights
Blue - Themes
Purple - Moments that matter (MTM)
I then organized everything into related group. The same set of priorities/tasks started to surface across all pirates—the differentiator was how each pirate approached that task. Each column is a participant and each color represents a priority or task. I assigned a spectrum for each task and different pirates varied in where they landed on the spectrum.
I looked across the different interviewed pirates and grouped those that have similar pirating styles to each other. This produced three most common groupings—which evolved into our archetypes. I wanted to show this process in this case study so you can see how my brain works when I synthesize!
Dark gray boxes are the summarization of each archetype attributes.
Purple post-its are pirate anecdotes that supports those attributes and archetype.
Dark green rectangles are moments that matter for this archetype.
Pink post-its represents challenges
Light green post-its are themes that we identified from the interviews and existing data through lit reviews
The big group of varying colored boxes show the different MTM for each archetype during different milestones of their seafaring journey.
PHASE 2 | DEFINE
Organizing and defining content
Here is one of the finalized archetypes, the “Mean Matey”, and the moments that matter (MTM) framework as a way to organize the qualitative data. The archetype page shows what number of pirates fit into this archetype as well as what their focus should be based on their documented challenges. We then used a force ranking system to identify the growth area for each archetype.
PHASE 3 | DESIGN
Concept designs & mocks
Now that we have the archetypes and MTM framework, we sketched out a few ideas around the opportunities for each pirate, framing our ideas around “how might we” provide for that opportunity .
Socializing design concepts into ecosystem
The last artifact to share here is the ecosystem we provided for our science team to know how our design concepts could fit in to the current network of pirate ships in the Caribbeans. Pirates can work together to share and elevate each other’s resources if they had the right guidance!
Wrap up
This project was to provide qualitative research to the existing quantitative data. Design concepts were to help the company visualize the current groups of existing pirates so that they could prioritize specific goals around supporting pirates. A product team would then pick this project up to identify their initiatives for creating or improving currently existing pirating tools. My role ended here.