What if we used Clubhouse for UX research?
What exactly is Clubhouse?
Clubhouse is an invitation-only networking app that is solely available to iPhone and iPad users at the moment. The app allows users to interact with people around the world via audio chat in spaces or “rooms.” Based on their professional, academic, and personal interests, users can join groups, connect, and speak with hundreds to thousands of people in real-time.
This unique app features moderators, speakers, and an audience in which moderators can host a room and choose who may speak or remove unruly speakers. Topics can vary from sports, design, to what everyone in the room is having for dinner.
Although the app launched in April 2020, its user base grew significantly towards the end of last year until today. Clubhouse now has 10 million weekly active users, up from 600,000 in December 2020. With such remarkable user growth, Clubhouse has become the perfect networking platform to share opinions, make friends, market users’ business ideas, and even recruit new hires for one’s company.
Read more about the trending app here.
How is Clubhouse relevant to UX research?
As an avid user of Clubhouse myself, I have actively engaged myself in networking with fellow UX Designers in groups and rooms day and night for the past two weeks. Through hopping from “UX Design 101” rooms to “Good Tips for Dog Owners” rooms, I quickly realized that Clubhouse could be more than ideal for UX Researchers and Designers to conduct open-ended and close-ended user interviews for qualitative and quantitative data.
There is a large volume of users from across the world.
Among the top non-U.S. countries that downloaded Clubhouse the most are Germany, Japan, UK, Turkey, and Canada. The more users from different cultural and social backgrounds come together on the app to share their insights on various topics, the more UX Researchers can obtain highly diversified data on their interviews. For users who speak more than one language, the opportunities to network globally are infinite!
Users are more authentic with their feedback.
The reliability of user surveys and interviews depends on various factors such as participants’ dishonesty in providing authentic answers, survey questions that can be interpreted differently by each user, close-ended questions that can limit answer choices, and more. However, on Clubhouse, speakers can choose to voice up their feedback when and if they want to in an open-ended or close-ended manner. These speakers and audiences are interested in the topic of the room in the first place, so it’s easy to gather the target users who can provide relevant insights regarding the topic.
Meaningful conversations can lead to valuable insights.
It has been almost a year since COVID-19 took a huge toll on our day-to-day lives. People are tired of their Zoom meetings where they must stay composed and aware of themselves and their surroundings. Because Clubhouse is audio-only, it allows users to jump in and out of conversations without a commitment, users can listen, learn, and chime in freely to share their insights. From these conversations, meaningful feedback can be shared between interviewers and participants even for a few minutes.
It is time and cost-efficient.
There are multiple platforms and ways to conduct user interviews. However, most of them, if not all, cost from 10–150 dollars per participant. Also, it is usually extremely difficult to align interviewers and participants schedules for real-time one-to-one sessions, therefore, oftentimes, especially UX Researchers and Designers at start-ups, opt for remote user interviews due to low budgets and lack of time. However, Clubhouse is free to use, interviewers can still pick and choose who may participate (in this case, become a speaker), and interviewers can ask follow-up questions immediately after participants’ answers for clarification. Additionally, if another user wishes to delve deeper into a question that was just answered, that’s great too.
Nevertheless, I do want to caveat that it is not that I think participants do not deserve any form of compensation. They do! As much as interviewers would like to compensate these participants, however, I think the biggest problem of adopting a UX culture at startups is that the stakeholders “don’t have the budget for UX.” Therefore, I believe that Clubhouse can be a great way to start fostering a UX culture at startups. Also, rather than a one-way interview, Clubhouse allows for a more engaging, two-way interview in which participants voluntarily join the interview and ask interviewers questions as well. During this process, participants may resolve their curious needs on the relevant services/products. For example, in both of my Clubhouse interviews, participants were genuinely curious/interested in my company’s services/products and a large number of participants turned their interview sessions into a series of questions, so I would think of this as a kind of give and take opportunity space.
Identifying potential flaws
As efficient and innovative as this idea sounds, there is also a few factors that could possibly hinder the efficiency of Clubhouse user interviews.
Participants come and go at any time.
It is an advantage that random users can participate in user interviews whenever they want. However, this also means that moderators will have to repeat the same set of questions for each participant. For any existing participants in the room, they will have to go through the same topics and questions over and over. This, nevertheless, could create an opportunity space for the existing participants to think through the questions again and provide the interviewers with more thoughtful, in-depth feedback.
Group dynamics can take over in focus groups.
Interviewing multiple people at a time in a focus group is pretty common for a company. However, when user interviews are devolved into focus groups, it is difficult to get the most authentic feelings about your product, in which Clubhouse’s biggest advantage is discounted. In order to prevent this issue, make sure to encourage all participants in the room to answer questions. And when asking sets of questions to a participant, make sure that you go one at a time, while taking turns in different sets of questions for fresh insights from each participant.
Running out of fresh participants.
How Clubhouse recommends rooms to users depends on whom they follow on the app. For instance, the app displays a list of rooms where there are a lot of mutual followers that are participating. Therefore, it is possible that after multiple rounds of user interviews, there may not be fresh user insights each round. Also, unless the interviewer is asking a new set of questions for each interview, the participants’ answers will get redundant.
There is a lack of inclusivity.
There are definite drawbacks of inclusivity to conducting user research on Clubhouse. As previously mentioned at the beginning of the article, Clubhouse is still accessible to iOS users only, which disregards a significant segment of people who may own Androids. Statistical research on the mobile operating systems market revealed that Google’s operating system is more common in the UK, Germany, China, and many other countries. The iPhone holds less than 20 percent of the market in Brazil, Nigeria, and India.
Although Clubhouse has plans to expand its services to Android users, it will take time. By the time Android users join the bandwagon, the hype may have died down already. Additionally, and more importantly, Clubhouse leaves deaf and hearing-impaired users out of research in which inclusive research and design are overlooked. Perhaps, the platform can adopt new features for such user groups to communicate soon (chat options, etc.) to overcome these challenges.
How to conduct user interviews on the app
Set a concrete goal(s) for the interview.
Decide if you would like general feedback (open-ended) or contextual feedback (close-ended) from participants and for how long you would like to host the room. Then prepare a number of questions accordingly. Try to come up with dialog-provoking questions that can gather a variety of data. Before beginning the interview, make sure to clearly state your purpose for the interview, where the data may be used, and your user goals.
Name your “room” with keywords.
It is important to set your topic with general keywords and specific terms to attract broad, yet targeted users for your user interviews. For instance, if you would like to conduct a user interview on identifying UX pain points of your product from current users, name your room as “(your product) users, give me UX feedback!” or simply “(your product) users’ room.” Per my recent experience, the latter was more successful in bringing more people in to participate.
Create a room with fellow interviewers and ask questions.
If you are conducting the interview by yourself, that is totally fine too. However, I would recommend that there are multiple moderators, so they can help facilitate the interview process more smoothly and less tiringly. Ask questions to participants and record answers and any feedback on GoogleDocs or voice records (only with consent), or whatever you are comfortable with.
Inquire follow-up questions or open up for other users to answer.
Getting insights from one or two users is fulfilling already, but why not have an open-discussion or follow-up session with multiple participants? This way, you could get diverse perspectives and takes from each question.
My experience with user interviews on the app
I have conducted two user interview sessions so far with my UX team at ODK Media Inc. I was the main moderator of both interviews in charge of asking questions and recording answers as well.
Because I am still testing out how to carry out user interviews on Clubhouse, I decided to have very broad, open-ended interviews to:
Determine the general user consensus of the services my company offers.
ODK Media Inc., has been a startup pioneer in legal content streaming in the U.S. and operates on platforms OnDemandKorea.com, OnDemandChina.com, OnDemandViet.com and OnDemandLatino. Internally, there have been assumptions regarding the company’s user data base (which may not be up-to-date) and the UX pain points the users may encounter on any of the platforms. However, my team and I wanted to find out if we can get fresh, new, and authentic insights from our current users on Clubhouse. After talking to a total of 15 users of OnDemandKorea from both interviews, my team and I could understand how the majority of our users feel about our services and features.
Identify user problems and needs, and their efficiency and satisfaction.
There were numerous user problems and needs to be addressed throughout both interviews. Because I kept the interviews very open-ended and general, it was possible to take in various user perspectives on multiple features throughout our platform, OnDemandKorea. A lot of feedback aligned with our existing assumptions, but there were also great user insights that we could have only found out through formal user interviews or usability tests. On top of identifying UX pain points, we were able to find out a number of back-end bug issues as well. Because all participants joined the interviews voluntarily, they were willing to give as much and as honest answers as possible, which further validated the research outcomes.
Here is what I think…
I think that conducting user research on Clubhouse could work well for startups to obtain real-time feedback on their existing products and services from their actual users. I also believe that conducting informal user interviews like the ones I have on Clubhouse could contribute to building and fostering a UX culture in fast-growing startups. Introducing the stakeholders to the actual end users’ thoughts of the product and simply letting them see the user problems their consumers are facing will bring successful user-centric changes.
Additionally, if possible, inviting people from different departments other than the design and research departments to these interviews can be crucial in showing them what UX designers and researchers do and how much impact their work has on the business’s success.
Also, due to clear limitations in obtaining the most inclusive research data on Clubhouse (no Android users yet, etc.) I would recommend that researchers integrate this method on top of various mixed-methods they already work with or use it as a broad, general starting point in their user research.
Last, but not least, be prepared to answer questions that could be beyond your knowledge (non-design related questions such as bug issues, etc). Thus, it is wise to further encourage people from various departments to participate in these interviews to counter each unexpected question with a solid answer.
Other than the few aforementioned weaknesses Clubhouse interviews may hold, I believe that the benefits of these interviews can be superb, and they should be actively utilized by many other UX designers and researchers, especially when the user influx is very high at the moment.
Thank you for reading🖤
Special thanks to my manager, Sanghyuk Lee
What do you think of conducting user research on Clubhouse? Have you considered or done it already? Please feel free to reach out if you have any feedback or questions!
©Lillian Choi 2021. All rights reserved.
lillianchoi96@gmail.com. Made with ☕️
