How We Use UX Research to Learn About Our Community

The Reverb community represents a unique group of buyers and sellers who share something very special: a passion for music in all its forms and an appreciation for the gear that makes it possible. It’s a privilege (and a lot of fun) to get to know more about these people, and the ins-and-outs of their journeys with music, so we can continue to improve the way we support and inspire them as they buy and sell musical gear.

This post summarizes how we use user research methods to uncover and understand the unique challenges and opportunities that make up our users’ personal journeys.

User Research at Reverb

User experience researchers at Reverb engage with a variety of internal teams and existing/potential customers to quickly develop and iterate great digital experiences around buying and selling in our marketplace. The UX research role focuses on a range of qualitative research inputs into product team strategy, design and development, including:

• Exploratory studies to help us understand the user’s world via interviews, storytelling and observation (in and outside of our site experience), to identify opportunities to delight and support our community;
• Generative studies to introduce early stage solution concepts or prototypes to users as prompts to add detail to our original findings and optimize our approach to challenges and opportunities; and
• Evaluative testing to assess the visibility, comprehension, relevance and usability of proposed or existing solutions.

All these methods benefit from collaboration with our teammates in product, design, engineering, marketing and customer experience. Colleagues help us create and revise our research plans and moderator guides, attend and observe interview sessions, debrief on findings as a group, and participate in analysis activities like affinity mapping of results so we can uncover recurring themes together.

(Affinity Mapping Session Output)

These small-sample qualitative findings are used to add context to emerging design ideas by grounding our concepts in real-world behavior. They can also be used to frame and inform surveys to validate our themes on a larger scale, or determine how we would validate hypotheses quantitatively after launch.

The Unique Qualities of the Reverb Community

At Reverb, our users’ journeys center around their relationship to music, and there is a lot of variation in the goals and challenges associated with their stories.

For instance, much of our buyer community initially resembled the experienced gear enthusiasts one might find gathering at local guitar shops or visiting online forums. Today, that audience has expanded to include a wider range of buyer motivations: more beginners looking to take their first step into the world of gear, family members or friends shopping for someone else, and experienced musicians and producers pivoting into another gear area (sometimes due to the pandemic’s impact on touring).

This range of user needs and motivation is evident in the support we give during the search/browse journey on our site. Recent studies with buyers in the search path have informed a range of improvements in the experience, including a focused approach to filtering results based on recurring user search patterns (on mobile and desktop), expanded support in the search box to generate better results, and increased visibility of buying guides in the experience for those that need more help to inform their decisions.

Our seller community also represents an array of selling strategies and goals, running the gamut from professional stores and chains, to the individual seller who occasionally sells an item to be able to purchase another, and all stops in between.

Our site and app need to support our sellers in shops managing and promoting hundreds (or even thousands) of listings, as well as casual sellers who may only visit our site sporadically and may need more support and guidance through the process.

This range and complexity in our user base has absolutely shaped and changed how we identify and recruit research participants, and how we interpret their behavior after the fact.

As we started to learn more about the lives of all of these different types of people (and the role music plays in their lives), we realized that their behavior online and their interaction with digital devices and features did not always follow the market segments that had previously been defined based on a user’s selling, listing and visit frequency on our platform alone.

For this reason, we have adjusted our approach to recruiting and modeling user behavior in a few ways:

• Instead of relying almost exclusively on existing sellers and buyers for feedback, we now often add a complementary sample of like-minded musicians and producers who are not familiar with us yet to our research samples, to be more inclusive and expand our view of what the community could be.
• We have learned that the behavior we see from sellers on our platform does not always map to what they do elsewhere. For example, a “potential” seller on our site may actually be an experienced seller locally or on another platform. So for digital development, we have started focusing on points along a series of behavior spectrums associated with more targeted parts of the experience:

• Instead of relying solely on listing and purchase data on our site, we have added more screening questions in our recruiting process for users to self-report their overall selling/buying behavior on and off the Reverb platform.

Our Users Help Us Understand the Bigger Picture of Their Journey

Adding to our collection of stories and outcomes over time reminds us to pull back from any one, simple interaction on the site and consider where that interaction falls in the bigger story. Does our experience support the user’s end-to-end process and needs in the best way possible at all the steps along the way? Are we designing for the context they prefer (e.g. mobile vs. desktop)? Are we missing opportunities to connect outside the site experience?

We have a lot of information now about what happens when our users arrive at our site or app. But so much research and so many decisions happen before they reach us that it only makes sense to understand the full journey, from awareness to inspiration to narrowing down options for purchase, to find new opportunities to connect and support them all along the way.

In the end, it’s not about users telling us what to make or how to make it (even if they have opinions about that) — it’s about our users helping us understand who they are, where they’re going and what gets in their way as they move toward a goal. The gift they give us is context, which helps us build a stronger design hypothesis.

User research helps to focus and prioritize the most relevant and helpful solutions and ensures that their implementation works effectively in the user’s journey toward their goals. Our community stories make our online experience stronger and more personal, and give us a common goal to work toward as we make the world more musical.

Interested in solving challenges like this one and making the world more musical? We’re hiring! Visit Reverb Careers to see open positions and learn more about our team, values, and benefits.