A technology company asked us:
How might we determine what safety and trust mean for customers who identify as women?
A client asked us for help better understanding the experiences of women using their platform to connect with service providers. Specifically, they wanted to understand circumstances where they felt unsafe, their expectations of safety options, and feedback on the helpfulness of proposed solutions and concepts.
We Answered:
We designed a dual-phase study with existing customers who identified as women and had experienced instances of feeling unsafe while using the product. During remote in-depth interviews, participants shared their experiences and provided feedback on a series of concepts meant to address safety concerns. In between phases, our client iterated on the concepts using feedback from the first round in order to gather additional feedback in phase two.
Outcome:
Through our research, we learned that many customers tolerated uncomfortable situations only because they were afraid of escalating the situation or of being gaslit.
Our recommendations identified a variety of improvements the client could make to ease safety concerns. These included reducing automated responses so when a customer contacts the company about a safety concern, they are immediately connected to an agent rather than a chatbot to get faster help. We also found that participants wanted transparency about safety enforcement and accountability to better understand what to expect and feel confident in their options while using the product. In speaking with these participants, we identified that real-time feedback could be immensely helpful, so we recommended that the client team move forward with product features that enable customers to give feedback about the resolution process. This will help future iterations of safety features and conflict resolution processes with real-time observations.
Experience Gap Research can help you identify critical gaps in your product for underrepresented groups. Contact us for help meeting your Experience Gap research goals.
