Competitive Study
Background
iTranslate is the leading translation and dictionary app. With the advent of cloud-based natural language processing services, the market has grown crowded and competition has intensified. The SVP of Marketing asked me to study why users choose a top competitor's iOS app over iTranslate.
Objectives
- Understand how users choose translation apps.
- Identify marketing and UX opportunities.
Research questions
- Who is choosing between iTranslate and its competitor?
- What is the experience of choosing a translator app in the App Store?
- How do people decide which translator app to install?
Constraints
The team was looking for insights they could incorporate into a strategy session coming up in just six weeks.
My role
I was the only researcher on this project. To meet the deadline I'd need to get scrappy when it came to method selection.
Partners
Senior marketing and product stakeholders that I involved throughout the project.
Process
Planning and initial research
- Led a kick-off meeting with marketing and product to determine objectives and understand constraints. I created a shared working document that I updated throughout the project.
- Met with marketers to understand current user acquisition strategies.
- Recruited people who had installed either iTranslate or the competitor within the last 30 days and interviewed them.
- Synthesized the interview data to identify a key attribute: participants installed translation apps because they were planning on traveling to a place they did not speak the language. The team confirmed this was a primary use case.
Study design
Now that I knew who I wanted to recruit I designed a remote, unmoderated study at a scale large enough that I could make inferences at 90% confidence. I recruited 40 participants who had plans to travel to a place where they did not speak the language within the next three months and were very likely to put a translator app on their iPhone. I tasked these participants with installing the translator app they would use on their upcoming trip.
Analysis
- I quantified everything I could: query term frequency, number of apps opened, screens scrolled through, and time on task looking for behavioral differences between participants that chose iTranslate and those who chose the competitor.
- I transcribed and coded, pulling out themes to build a framework to understand the metrics.
Impact
After five weeks I presented stakeholders with an App Store search behavior model, a list of what's most important in a translator app, and recommendations. My research influenced the team on three levels:
- Marketing tactics. One of the insights that I uncovered was a level of stress
- Feature prioritization.
- Enthusiasm for user-centered design
