Prioritize valuable contextual awareness use cases in Southeast Asia
Agency collaboration
Generative
Prioritization
Expectation management
A strategic UXR project in collaboration with the external agency frog, with the objective of gaining an initial understanding of how to implement contextual awareness services in the emerging Southeast Asia market.
Year: 2022-2023
Team: OPPO & frog
Role: Lead UX Researcher
Research Type: Strategic UXR
Background
Contextual Awareness in Southeast Asia
Contextual awareness services, a pivotal strategy for ColorOS, focus on enabling the mobile operating system to intelligently suggest and deliver personalized services to users based on their specific contexts. This entails utilizing user-specific data such as time, location, and app usage habits to accurately determine their circumstances, thus offering tailor-made and targeted services.
ColorOS has been dedicated to understanding Chinese user behaviors and has been experimenting with contextual awareness services in the Chinese markets. Now, starting from 2022, we are excited to extend ColorOS's reach to global markets, with a primary focus on Southeast Asia.
Goal & Research Questions
How to implement contextual awareness in the Southeast Asia market?
The product team for contextual awareness services, based in China, is preparing to introduce these services to the Southeast Asia market. However, they are uncertain about the specific scenarios where contextual awareness services will prove valuable. As a result, our team has been tasked with devising a strategy to effectively implement contextual awareness in this new market.
As depicted in the graph below, I encountered 3 significant challenges upon receiving this research request.
Challenge 1 & 2
Given that my team and I are not well-versed in understanding Southeast Asian users, I recommended seeking assistance from a local agency to collaborate on this project. By doing so, we can address these challenges more effectively and ensure a successful outcome.
Challenge 3
The request to formulate a strategy for implementing contextual awareness in Southeast Asia was initially quite vague and broad. To address this, my next step involved conducting stakeholder interviews to gain internal clarity and align expectations. This process allowed us to refine the scope of the project and ensure a more focused and effective strategy moving forward.
Pre-research
Clarify the context and align expectations
01
Understand the context
Stakeholder interviews
I selected three key stakeholders: the product lead of contextual awareness services in China, the engineering lead of contextual awareness, and the lead of ColorOS.
Subsequently, I conducted interviews with them to gain insights into the following aspects:
- The existing knowledge and experiences we possess regarding contextual awareness.
- The stakeholders' expectations for the desired outcomes of this project.
- The resources available to us for executing this project.
Following the interviews, I gained valuable insights into the stakeholders' specific expectations from the project. With all the gathered information, I refined the initial research question, making it more specific. Moreover, I broke down the research question into several smaller components to ensure better comprehension for the 3rd party vendor.
Kindly refer to the chart below for the revised research question and its breakdown.
02
Match with the reality
Discussion with vendors and specify the scope
After clarifying the context and research questions, I created a project brief and collaborated with our procurement team to approach several potential agencies.
During the discussions and negotiations with the agencies, I successfully aligned our expectations with the achievable goals within the constraints of time and budget. As a result, I specified our target market, narrowing it down from the general Southeast Asia region to two key countries (Thailand and Indonesia) that would represent the region. Additionally, instead of exploring all contextual awareness scenarios, I suggested the approach to utilize research to prioritize top 6 scenarios for deep dive and then focus on the 2 most promising use cases for further concept incubation.
By doing so, we ensured a clearer focus and a well-defined scope for the project, setting the stage for effective collaboration with the chosen agency.
Research
Prioritization Strategy
How we identify the top 6 scenarios for deep dive?
* Detailed research process and insights are not shown here due to confidentiality. For more information, please contact yichenwang96@gmail.com.
After a comprehensive market research and a survey and in-depth interviews to understand user needs, the agency suggested to use the DVF framework to prioritize the 30+ use cases and identify innovation opportunities based on customer and business value.
The DVF framework means to evaluate each use case across Desirability, Viability and Feasibility, so that to obtain a total DVF score for each use case with the calculation of (Desirability + Viability) / Feasibility.
My contribution in this process was to define the appropriate metrics for calculating Desirability, Viability, and Feasibility. Given that the 3rd party agency lacked the same level of knowledge as me regarding the ColorOS system and the existing efforts on contextual awareness services in the Chinese market, it became essential for me to identify the metrics valued by our team. This ensured that the calculations for the three key framework categories made sense and aligned with our objectives.
Please find below the detailed definition of all the metrics we used for prioritization.
Post-research
From PDF Report to Real Buy-in
After completing all the research, frog delivered a comprehensive report addressing our questions about contextual awareness services in Southeast Asia. However, the extensive 100+ page report might be overwhelming for stakeholders to fully digest, leading to potential confusion on the next steps. There is a risk that the report might end up on the shelf without translating into tangible changes and impact on the contextual awareness product.
To avert this scenario, I condensed the 100+ page report into a concise 30+ page presentation deck. Within this deck, I included a table that clearly showcased all explored scenarios and their respective priority levels, along with a list of suggested scenarios/opportunity areas to be implemented initially.
To ensure effective communication, I conducted a presentation and invited all stakeholders and leadership who expressed interest in the project. This approach proved to be highly successful in conveying the insights and ensuring that the research findings translated into actionable decisions for the contextual awareness product.
Initial 100+ page report
One summary table with all scenarios and their priorities
Impact
Valuable first step
This initiates the foundational step for implementing contextual awareness services in SEA, comprising a prioritized list of use cases and services for initial implementation.
Trust for investment on UXR resourses
Demonstrate the tangible value of investing in outsourcing projects to external local agencies, especially for projects about new markets.
Reflections
What I learned from this project
Stakeholder Engagement
Effective stakeholder engagement becomes even more crucial in projects involving vendors due to the inherent lower levels of trust.
Over Communicate
Clear and consistent communication becomes especially critical in projects involving vendors. With both internal stakeholders and external vendors to coordinate, the chances of misunderstandings can increase.
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