How Credit Karma Turns Journey Mappings into Treasure Hunts with dscout’s Diary
Emma Quinn of Credit Karma takes us through how her team partnered with dscout to attain rich user insights while facing COVID constraints.
At the beginning of 2020, Emma Quinn, Senior UX Researcher at Credit Karma, began to lay down the foundation of a project to investigate the home-buying journey—specifically, the highs and lows of the mortgage process.
When COVID hit, the team opted to broaden the recruitment strategy to include a larger proportion of folks who had already purchased a home, offering her team a glimpse into the pre- and during COVID buying process. Switching their original in-person workshop plan to attaining reflective data remotely using dscout Diary.
The team wanted to effectively tell the story of the customer experience and keep both scouts and stakeholders engaged, so they opted to utilize journey mapping.
Utilizing the journey map here, they gave the scouts the following prompts.
- Please identify the homebuying moments
- What were some of the highs and lows of homebuying?
- Please record an emoji that pairs with each moment
- In your own words, describe your home buying journey via-video
Case study #1 – Scout treasure maps
After the scouts reflected on the journey map prompts, they were asked to create a treasure map to symbolize a journey map of their own.
“The treasure maps that the scouts submitted were amazing. They were so creative and rich that one of our designers made a Google Slides gallery of the different journeys so that the team could reference them as we were building our journey map, and we still have that as a deliverable today.”
Case study #2 – Efficient remote collaboration
To start analyzing, Emma broke the research team into pods and assigned each pod one of the six Diary mission parts. From there, each team member had a set of scouts to review and take notes on. Afterwards, they came together as a large group and discussed the trends, patterns, and surprises they saw.
“Breaking it down into pods helped us achieve a really rich experience, while not being overloaded with information. I got a lot of feedback that just watching the videos and hearing things first hand was really helpful. Those kinds of stories stick with you, especially being able to reflect on peoples’ experiences during our discussions, and being able to reference the treasure map."
The impact
In the end, dscout helped Credit Karma attain rich insights on their users’ home-buying experience, pain points, and goals—all while meeting the challenges of COVID constraints.
“For me, dscout made so much sense to use, because a journey map is something that unravels over time.” You can use dscout to capture things over time, but also capture these real-life moments of when things go right, when they go wrong, and then also use it as a tool for reflection.”
“It's so amazing what you can get in a two-minute video. It doesn't sound like a lot, but if you ask the right questions, you can glean so much rich data. It makes so much sense for this project because we're looking at this complicated thing that rolls out over time.”
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