Project Background
XimpleThings is a one-stop platform to help you keep track of your electronics' warranty. The co-founder contacted me to propose a user research study to help uncover any user insights and user behaviour that would motivate a mobile app user to use a warranty tracking app.
The research insights would enable the key stakeholders of XimpleThings to identify future opportunities, pivoting of the product offerings and raise any red flag on product-market fit strategy. The users' feedback could also validate or invalidate the right target user segment for the warranty tracking app.
Project Scope
The research is devised in the form of a moderated one-to-one user interview, at the participant's home or an arranged meeting venue. The participant consist of home owners and gadget lovers will be requested to answer a set of semi-structured questions during the interview.
Research Questions
A portion of the questions would consist of demographic profiling of the selected participants so the information could be collated into developing key personas.
The participants were also asked questions regarding the obstacles they faced while making their own product comparisons.
In addition, they were asked to describe what type of warranty registration procedure and painpoints they had experienced?
Learnings
The user Insights are clustered into a few main categories for post-analysis to provide a list of key findings for future product improvements of XimpleThings.
The learnings from the user interview sessions were used to create key user personas and compiled into a comphrensive research report on Google Docs.
I have listed a few key learning points below to illustrate the key research findings.
Warranty Pain Points
- Always lose the paper warranty registration cards or could not recall where they have
kept them.
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Consumers often forget to register the warranty online after a purchase.
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Forgotten to mail out warranty cards that are required to be sent out to the manufacturers.
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Frustrated with the long queue at the service centre on weekends.
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The location of the service centres are very remote and not easily accessible by public transport.
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Consumers are not well informed on the feasibility of the service job.
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Consumers have vague ideas on what are the parts and conditions of the product a warranty exactly covers. There are a lot of fine prints in the warranty card that are not well-explained.
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The warranty period is too short as it is only valid for a one year period and it has limited servicing coverage.
Feature Wishlist
- The app user would prefer the shop assistant helps to in-store to register the warranty after he have made a payment. This e-service should also be able to cater to most of the prominent electronic brands.
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Prefer to register the warranty online because it helps to avoid the problem of keeping too many cards and losing them.
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Upon registering the warranty, includes an additional pick-up service to collect the repair items to a service centre for servicing and return the repaired goods when done. This Send-for-repair feature should focus on creating convenience for the users. Consumers would consider to pay a minimum fee of $15, if the repair job is for a bulky item is at a faraway service center.
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Suggest that the manufacturers could devise a warranty triage process for evaluating repair effort of the electronic appliances during the next few consecutive years of usage. It would come with a range of warranty coverage or other value-added servicing packages to the consumers on the second year.
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The customer servicing team could help evaluate and inform the consumers on what range of servicing cost and what type of coverage they will require on the second year onwards.
Click link to view the user research report ⟶
