Weight Watchers UXR Internship

UX Research Internship

TL;DR

Skills: Usability Testing, Qualitative Analysis, Data Cleaning, Data Visualization, Literature Review, Interviewing, Stakeholder Management, Card Sorting Analysis, Reporting

Top Lessons Learned: One of the most valuable takeaways from my internship was how to conduct research effectively in an industry setting as opposed to academia.

Firstly, results reporting was much more focused on business impact and storytelling, focusing on the audience (designers, not just other researchers!). Just like you aren't the user, you also aren't the audience.
Secondly, I learned how to use research to find business opportunities - such as the areas of opportunity I found in my literature review, which found gaps between the in-person WW experience and the online experience.
Thirdly, I got an opportunity to stay calm and think on my feet when everything went wrong with our prototype and UserTesting during usability sessions when our research ops lead and my boss were both on vacation. I successfully completed all sessions and was able to deliver results despite the difficulties.

Lastly, this internship did end with a full-time offer which I accepted. However, due to a major restructuring of the company, the position was eliminated a few months later. I will always be thankful for the WW Research team for making WW such an amazing place to work!

So what did I do?

At Weight Watchers, I worked with UX researchers, project managers, and product designers on several projects, owning research projects from start to finish. My day-to-day activities included working with stakeholders to discover pain points, creating research plans, writing interview scripts, moderating user interviews and usability tests, analyzing results of research sessions, analyzing survey results, cleaning data, reporting results to stakeholders, creating literature reviews, and more.

Internship Projects:

Weight Experience Literature Review: To direct the research roadmap for H2 and find areas of opportunity, I conducted a literature review around weight and weight experience. Key areas of discovery included a lack of support during normal weight fluctuations and celebrating both scale and non-scale victories with users. This literature review was essential to an on-site design workshop that led to 5 new concepts that entered concept testing following my internship.
Usability Testing: To validate new designs for the calendar and food tracking features, I ran usability testing on two prototypes. After running the sessions, I analyzed our data and reported findings and recommendations to stakeholders.
Competitive UX Analysis: To support our quarterly competitive analysis report, I helped complete a competitive UX quantitative analysis of survey data regarding several measures of satisfaction such as NPS. This project included data cleaning and creating data visualizations.
GLP-1 Reporting: To evaluate usability and overall user sentiment toward a newly launched WW product for for users who are taking GLP-1s (weight loss medications), I analyzed qualitative data from 12 user interviews with participants who are taking GLP-1s and created a slide deck with findings and recommendations to share with stakeholders..
App Information Architecture Usability & Validation Testing: To validate the newly designed app IA that we initially tested with a card sort, I created and ran two usability studies for the new app IA redesign.

^{Here are some snapshots of research report decks I created during my internship.}

Because I got to work on so many projects I can't go into too much detail here, but here is a case study of the longest project I worked on - conducting usability testing on the new IA.

The WW app needed new IA to reduce scrolling

App IA Background

The Weight Watchers app is being revamped to reduce scrolling and friction across the app for users - part of this involves a restructure of the app information architecture (IA).

Research at WW has shown that the more users track their food and weight, the more likely they are to succeed. By reducing barriers to tracking such as scrolling, clutter, and unclear IA, we can help our members be more successful in their health and wellness goals.

Research Goals & Questions

Evaluate the usability of the core app UI and redesign with a focus on:

How do users' mental models map up against our new navigation?
Do users understand how the calendar functionality affects content states?
How do users track food - do they primarily use the search bar or the text CTAs? Do they have different use cases?

I created a usability study to test the IA

Recruitment Criteria

For this study we recruited 9 participants that were a mix of current WW users, lapsed WW users, and people who had never used WW but had a weight loss goal. One participant failed to attend.
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Methodology

We conducted 8 one-on-one moderated sessions over usertesting.com

Users were directed through narrative A or narrative B, which included the same 9 tasks but encountered in a different order. The purpose of the A/B narratives was to see if there are differences that are reflected in how they experience tasks, and if any tasks primed users to more easily complete other tasks.

The tasks included tracking activity, tracking food, finding recipes, and more.

Users understood the new IA and used it with ease

^{This is the previous app, not what we tested}

There were several main areas of discovery:

Participants generally understood where to find the information they were asked to find, and were successful in completing all tasks.
Participants understood the new navigation.
Participants who had never used the WW app were able to navigate more quickly and easily than participants who currently or had previously used the WW app, because current and lapsed members were used to the current app IA.
There were different use cases for the food logging behavior and where participants expected to accomplish those actions, whether they were batch adding food, logging at the very end of the day, or when they wanted to log a food they had never eaten.
Participants had varying expectations of how to change the date when tracking food or weight.

App IA 2.0 - What about icons?

Project Background

After our first round of testing, the design went through more iteration to have the new secondary navigation to have a similar design to a separate WW app for users taking GLP-1 medications.

The navigation was redesigned to have tabs, and then to have icons instead of text.

The search and tracking was also redesigned following the findings from the previous study, and needed to be tested with users. It featured a new design and tracking logic.

Research Questions

Our research questions remained the same from the previous study, with the addition of seeing how participants used the new tracking CTA, and exploring user comprehension and impressions of an early concept tracking CTA logic.
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Recruitment Criteria

For this study we recruited 9 participants that were a mix of current WW users, lapsed WW users, and people who had never used WW but had a weight loss goal.
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Methodology

Because we were testing the same navigation with a different design, we used the same two narrative usability scripts, with additional final questions regarding the new CTA logic and the icon navigation.

TLDR; Icons don't work well

As expected, many of our original findings were confirmed by this study. We also had some new findings for the new design changes, and some new findings that were either different from the first round or didn't come up the first round

Notable similarities to the first round:

Participants were generally successful navigating the app and accomplishing tasks.
Participants generally understood the new navigation.
Current and lapsed members initially took more time in understanding the new IA of the app compared to people who had never used the app.
Participants had varying expectations of how to change the date to track food or weight.

Notable differences from the first round:

Most participants easily tracked using the new food tracking CTA. No one used search. However, some participants wanted the ability to skip meals.
Participants were split on preference for the icons or text secondary navigation.
Not all the icons were easily understood - some icons were clearly understood by all participants, some were partially understood, and some where not understood by anyone.

The IA works, lets do more research on the rest

Based on these findings I made two main recommendations to the design team. Firstly, to design and test several variations of the icons if they want to move forward with the icon navigation, as they are more easily misinterpreted. Secondly, more research is needed on tracking behaviors, and potential research questions could include: Does the new tracking CTA logic increase tracking behaviors? How many users skip meals?

Following this study, the design team decided to not move forward with icons, and felt confident with moving forward with this version of the IA as the MVP.

App IA Reflections

This study ran into many problems during the execution stage, and I had to make many quick last minute adjustments to continue the study.

The design was changed twice, the day before the study and the day of. I adjusted the moderating script and research questions last minute based on the new designs.
During the first usability session, the bottom navigation was not appearing on the users device. After troubleshooting with her, I shared my screen and had her continue to think out loud and tell me where she would click so I could click through the prototype for her.
The design team could not figure out how to fix the prototype, so I created new testing sessions to run on desktop.
One user had audio issues, so I also had her dial in with her phone so she could hear me.
There were issues with UserTesting.com - we attempted to reschedule some sessions, and were unable to cancel the reschedule requests to continue the sessions once the issues were fixed. We had to go through a new recruit for 2 participants.

Despite all of these issues, we were able to finish all of our sessions, have our participants work through the prototype, run our usability test, better understand users' mental models, and get impressions and feedback on the information architecture and navigation design.

These issues also gave me a great opportunity to practice thinking on my feet, being flexible, and making the project work and be completed despite the difficulties.

If I were to do this project again, I would have rescheduled the study following the initial design change followed by the prototype not working. The design change from text to icons seemed very last minute to me, however my manager (who normally works on this product area with these designers) was out of town and I didn't feel like I should make any changes to the plan as an intern. We were able to get good confirmation that the IA works, and to not pursue icons, but it might have been fine to not run the study at all with some more discussion, and work on something else instead.

Internship Reflections

I learned so much from my internship, and I'm really grateful that I worked on such a variety of projects and got such a breadth of experiences. I got more experience doing hands-on research, I learned how to work with stakeholders effectively, and I was able to get experience juggling several research projects at once.

I think the biggest thing I took away from my internship was the importance of storytelling with research - learning more about how deliver impactful results to stakeholders. It doesn't matter if you did the most interesting and important research if no one is listening, or if you cannot communicate the results effectively. My first project that I delivered results on needed a lot of extra help from my manager to get it to a place where I could share it with stakeholders, but by the end of my internship I was able to create reports and share results with minimal observation and in a much more impactful way.
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I couldn't post all of it but for some snapshots of my final intern presentation click through the slides below!