Are Drinkaware’s products meeting user needs?
We’re interviewing people who are drinking over the national guidelines
We recently started working with Drinkaware, a charity that’s raising awareness about the amounts people are drinking and the effect that has. They asked us to help them with some of their objectives:
- to evaluate their products against the outcomes they want to achieve and the needs of their users
- investigate/validate user needs for people in the UK who are increasingly drinking more and designing interventions for them to reduce their consumption
- upskill their teams around digital ways of working, especially user research and product ownership
What we’ve done so far
We started this project by speaking to the Drinkaware project sponsors and agreeing priorities and ways of working with them. We’ll work together from their offices. I’ll be the product and delivery lead alongside two of our user researchers and one of the team from Drinkaware.
There’s been no time to waste so we quickly recruited user research participants with all interviews taking place this week. The research sessions will have a semi-structured interview followed by usability testing of Drinkaware’s current online products. The semi-structured interview aims to understand:
- how their alcohol consumption has changed throughout different phases of their lives
- what triggers people have in their lives that make them drink more/less
- whether they’re aware of their current consumption levels
- whether they’ve ever looked for information or guidance around their drinking habits
- what coping mechanisms they might have
We’re interviewing people who are drinking over the national guidelines, but still not so much that they are drinking very heavily every day. We used an industry-standard scoring system to determine the segment of users, and then reached out to them through Drinkaware’s existing channels, as well as our own social media channels.
What’s next?
Once we’ve completed the interviews, we’ll quickly move on to analysing the insights. We’ll then prepare a report at the start of October for Drinkaware to present to the project sponsors.
We plan to identify:
- what are the needs of potential users who are at increasing risk of harmful alcohol drinking
- how are Drinkaware’s current products meeting these needs
- what else needs to be on offer from Drinkaware so that user needs can be met, both offline and online
- how can we build the digital skills in Drinkaware that will support their products in the right way in the long run
We’ll blog again once we have more insights from this project to share.