Growth & Mobile Research

Stritz Sound Studio

Stritz Sound Studio is a music recording studio with online and offline services. The studio was looking to continue its steady growth and expand.

Background Information

I was the Client Experience Coordinator of Stritz Sound Studio. After a couple years working at the studio I noticed that growth was slowing down. I wanted understand why.

Project Goals

Investigate potential causes of growth stagnation
Increase bookings month over month

Method

Surveying clients

I started with a survey study to pinpoint the cause of our growth issues. To ensure clients complete the survey I kept the survey short with just 5 questions:

1) "How did you hear about us?"

This question assesses our traffic sources. For instance if no one on the survey is from instagram then maybe there is an issue with our Instagram ads.

2) "How easy was it for you to book your first session?"

This measures the ease of booking and indicates whether there is a problem directly in our booking process.

3) "What was your first impression when entering our studio?"

This question measures first impressions. I included this to see if first impressions were correlated with the overall review of our service (question 4).

4) "If you had to review our service with a score out of 10, what score would you give us?"

Question 4 measures customer satisfaction with our service, if it is low, then we are likely losing out of referrals.

5) "What did you like the most or least about our service? Is there anything you think we can do better?"

Question 5 was to collect recommendations.

Survey Results

After the survey, I looked for correlations and trends. Most of the data was straightforward, except for the ease of booking question. Responses were polar for this question. Most people gave 5/5, but a few outliers gave us a very low rating.

When taking a closer look, I found that all of the outliers had found us online, but not everyone who found us online was an outlier.

Solving the Problem

I needed to find who this issue was affecting and why. There were 2 possibilities (1) a broken link from one of our web traffic sources OR (2) an issue in our online booking process that only affects some users.

I made a plan to narrow down the cause of the outliers' difficulty to book a session:

Make sure external links from social media sites to our website work.
Analyze web analytics to see if there are traffic reports showing abnormal data
Conduct usability testing on the booking flow to pinpoint the problem

All of the web links worked. But looking at the analytics, I noticed that our mobile bounce rate was alarmingly high. After a spot check, I realized that our mobile site was broken: images weren't loading correctly and text was overlapping. I quickly identified that the issue was caused by not checking on the mobile site when changes were made to the desktop version.

We immediately implemented a fix. I later did a full usability test to confirm that there weren't further problems. The problem was easy to fix and likely could have been avoided if we checked our mobile site after each update. To avoid future mobile issues, I updated our process to check all platforms anytime there are updates.

Research Impacts

Product Impacts

50% decrease in mobile site bounce rate
26% increase in bookings

Team Impacts

New process to ensure that updates are being done across all platforms
Because the survey study led to meaningful product improvements it became a monthly process at our company

Key Learnings

A few outliers can provide a lot of information, especially considering users with similar frustrations may no longer use the product, and therefore are not included in the data.
Updating one version of a platform can lead to changes in other versions. It is important to conduct user testing across all available platforms.
Regularly monitor metrics to identify when there is a change in factors such as mobile bounce rate. This way you can identify and fix the problem before it affects your business.

Before

For bounce rates, anything below 40% is considered excellent

After