Overview
Deep user research to unlock a new product direction
Project Gamma was a six-month research initiative designed to answer a fundamental question: why were users abandoning the product after their first 30 days? Despite strong acquisition numbers, churn was unexpectedly high, and the existing analytics couldn't tell us why. We needed to go deeper than the data.
I designed and led a multi-method research program: contextual inquiry, diary studies with 20 participants, moderated usability sessions, and a large-scale survey. The synthesis work revealed patterns that fundamentally changed how we understood our users — and what the product needed to do for them.
The Challenge
Translating rich qualitative data into actionable direction
The challenge wasn't collecting the data — it was making sense of it. After 200+ hours of sessions and thousands of data points, the team needed a way to build shared understanding without drowning in complexity. I developed a synthesis framework that organized findings around user mental models, which gave us a common language and helped stakeholders across the org engage with the research meaningfully.
[Process documentation and imagery to be added — research plan, interview guides, affinity mapping, journey maps, key insight summaries, presentation to leadership.]
Outcome
Research reoriented the product roadmap
The research directly influenced the product roadmap for the following two quarters. Three major initiatives were re-prioritized based on the findings, one previously planned feature was deprioritized entirely, and a new onboarding flow was designed from scratch using the mental model framework. Early results from the new onboarding approach showed strong improvement across activation metrics.