A deep dive with a key audience for a global broadcaster
Rich insight created a shared understanding our client’s target audience and clearer focus on important content themes.
This gave a global broadcast media company a better starting point to create relevant, engaging content delivered through multiple platforms.
The challenge:
- Enable the client team to create an informed multi-channel strategy for daytime content.
- Understand how digital media fits into the daily routine of a specific audience group.
- Understand what content is engaging and why.
- Explore which channels and devices are used to consume content.
The approach
- Diary study with 24 respondents to highlight audience habits, spontaneous behaviours, and areas of opportunity.
- Depth interviews with engaged respondents to further probe areas of interest.
- Workshop to create insight and actionable recommendations to inform content and design decisions.
A global broadcast media company
Diary study
Phase 1: Diary study
We conducted a one-week diary study to understand how our client’s target audience, women aged 25 – 45 in the UK, consumed daytime media.
Diary studies are great for understanding people’s habits, attitudes and patterns of behaviour over time. They help us to learn about and identify a specific target audience, but also understand how a product or service fits naturally into their day to day lives.
Research statistics
Female participants
Days of research
Diary entries by participants
Getting to know 22 women
Participants were encouraged to send photographs to capture what they were reading, watching or listening to, and their environment – in essence, an online scrapbook of their experiences.
This method allowed us to gain a richer understanding of the user’s interests, and media consumption habits over time.
We identified global themes, such as why certain channels were more compelling and content themes, such as topics of interest around family, education, career, etc.
These insights helped build an overarching view of the audience and how our client could produce content to meet their needs.
Phase 2: Depth interviews
After the week-long diary study, we conducted qualitative interviews with 11 of the most engaged users. We were able to probe areas of interest that were identified in the initial diary study.
We also asked participants direct questions about their views of our client’s current daytime media offering. This helped us build a clearer picture of what the audience liked and disliked about the content being offered and the channels it was being shared across.
As we synthesised our findings three distinct sub-groups emerged, each with quite different goals, habits and content interests. We created a rich, visual documentation of these groups for sharing and re-use across the organisation.
Phase 3: using insight to form strategy
Workshops with our client
Following on from a week of diary studies and a week of depth interviews we had a wealth of data to sift through. We presented our findings to the client and led a working session to answer the following questions:
- Who is the future digital target audience?
- Where can they reach this audience?
- What content would appeal to this audience?
We compared the client’s current brand promise to what our insights identified as the target audience needs. Aligning the two helped establish experience design principles that would describe what our client wants viewers to remember about their experience with their brand across their broadcast, website and social.
Outcome
Our insights brought the target audience into sharper view. We developed six experience design principles to help our client’s content producers and digital channel managers create greater audience engagement.
Activities
Recruitment screener and guide, diary study tasks/discussion guide, data from diary study – copy, videos, and images, recordings from depth interviews, transcripts and high-level findings, collaborative de-brief.
Delivery
Swift five-week project centred around two weeks of data capture.
Get in touch
We'd be very happy to talk through more examples of our work.
Contact Ed Walker, Business Development Director on ed@foolproof.co.uk.
Global logistics company
We helped a billion-dollar company deepen its UX capabilities. A shared vision for future customer experience has informed a roadmap for investment and improvement over several years.
Sony PlayStation
We helped get more customers to use Sony PlayStation for content-on-demand services. Diary study research informed the prototype of a new user experience.
TfL
We designed the user interface for TfL’s self-serve ticket machines. From sketching to physical prototypes through to production-ready design we delivered an experience used by millions to keep London moving.