Cell Signaling Technology

Working in a team of two, we conducted a China user research filed study, for Cell Signaling Technology (CST).

Key goals of the field study:

User Interviews

• Validate personas and create journey maps
• Learn about antibody purchasing decision-making patterns
• Reach understanding around product search patterns

Usability Evaluation

• Evaluate usability of Home page, Search Results page and Product Detail page

Benchmarking Analysis

• Evaluate usability of competitors
• Understand the opportunities that exist around Related Products and User Reviews

The focus was to mainly interview those of the Millennial generation.

Next, I created an answer matrix in Mural, documenting the participants' answers by persona.

View at scale:

View zoomed in:

After documenting the interviews and creating the matrix, I crafted an affinity diagram to arrive at key findings.

"I want to buy related products but I can't find them."

"Why would I contact CST China? I will contact my local distributor instead - I

trust him."

• Google is banned in China - users must use Baidu but consider its search results untrustworthy
• 80% of users are interested in buying CST Related Products
• Only 10% can find Related Products on the Product Detail page
• 80% of users want to purchase XP antibodies from CST
• Users prefer to use WeChat and QQ to communicate with the distributor
• 80% buy secondary antibodies from a local Chinese vendor, due to pricing concerns
• 95% of users use their own protocols for experiments
• 98% of users resolve all of their needs through their trusted distributor
• 70% wanted to see images (expected results of experiment), on the Search Results page
• 98% were interested in seeing citations on the Search Results page
• 95% would like to see user reviews on the Search Results page

Home page

• Hero banner should only be for promotions

Search Results page

• Include citation count in search results
• Include reviews number in search results
• Include images (expected results of experiment) in search results

Product Detail page

• Related or companion products need to be featured more prominently
• Enable filtering of citations, based on application and species
• Add alias protein names
• Include the UniProt ID and link to the UniProt database
• Provide reviews filtering functionality, based on application and species

Other Suggestions

• Participants expressed interest in CST adding User Forums for troubleshooting and advice on which antibodies work in unlisted applications and reactivity
• Our distributors expressed interest in CST adding a virtual shopping cart to the Website, that would send order requests directly over to them.

Conducting the China user research field study was an incredibly rewarding experience. I learned so much about the behavior of our users, as well as Chinese culture and doing business in China. Going forward, it would be beneficial to conduct additional research in the following areas:

• The role of secondary distributors 
• The growing trend of using purchasing platforms
• Opportunities around the CST WeChat account
• Further investigate the concept of CST Forums
• Usability test with users and distributors, a pilot prototype of the (distributor) CST virtual shopping cart