Leading user research — Marie Bautista |

Lumosity Resurrection Research

Understanding why users leave Lumosity, and their experience upon return

THE COMPANY

Lumos Labs believes in helping people keep their brains challenged. As a company, they transform science into engaging experiences. Their core product, Lumosity, enables individuals to train core cognitive abilities through fun games built on the foundation of cognitive tasks.

RESPONSIBILITIES

Lead Researcher, Research Strategy, Interviewing, Research Synthesis, Leading Workshops

CONTEXT & CHALLENGE

Lumosity has an ongoing relationship with its users. Users come into the product to work on cognitive skills, progress over time, and learn about their brain. Their experience changes if they are a first time user, have been in the product for a few months, or if they’ve left and just returned.

While we had previously done research on why active users engage with Lumosity, we had not taken the time to understand how that experience changes over time, why users drop off, and why some of them return. To help get a better understanding the resurrected user (returning user) experience, I took on the initiative to lead a research project with the goal of guiding project initiatives and helping teams get a shared understanding of who they’re building solutions for. For this initiative, I worked with a data scientist, an associate researcher, and a product manager.

APPROACH

When starting this project, we decided to take a 3-pronged approach to ensure we were strategic in the information gathered, utilizing both quantitative and qualitative data (Figure 1).

DATA SCIENCE

We began with data science to understand behaviors of resurrected users when they returned. Working with a data scientist, we sought to understand:

Triggers that bring users back into Lumosity
Actions engaged users take on their first day back
Factors that predict whether a user will drop off during resurrection, and at what point in the resurrection funnel
Where resurrected users drop off when they return

MICRO SURVEY

While collecting quantitative data, we ran micro-surveys in the product to define the direction of our user interviews (Figure 2). To reduce friction in the return experience, our surveys were short 1-question prompts that occurred after a user had completed a game. The questions were open ended and revolved around user expectations when returning to Lumosity.

We targeted users that have returned after a minimum a year of inactivity. We further used this survey to gauge interest from users to participate in our future interviews.

Figure 2: Post workout micro-survey — **Figure 2:** Post workout micro-survey

INTERVIEWS

Once getting a base understanding of user behavior from data science and initial surveys, I began crafting a research protocol to guide our process. I worked with our associate researcher to interview 10 resurrected users. Some questions we hoped to answer were:

Why do users drop off in the first place?
Why do they return?
What’s their experience returning?
What do users do when they return?
How do they feel about returning to the Lumosity?

After completing the interviews, we worked to synthesize our findings (Figures 3 & 4). We spent hours buried in post-it notes working on finding trends, insights, and opportunities for the Lumosity experience.

Figure 3: Affinity mapping insights, themes, and quotes from research — **Figure 3:** Affinity mapping insights, themes, and quotes from research

Figure 4: Embedding self into affinity map spaces to synthesize findings — **Figure 4:** Embedding self into affinity map spaces to synthesize findings

RESEARCH OUTPUT

There were 3 key deliverables from this initiative: a synthesis deck, design principles, and research led workshops.

The synthesis deck highlighted key themes of the research and opportunity spaces for the product (Figure 5). We presented our findings to various Lumosity teams to foster a sense of user empathy. The deck helped teams understand the user journey starting from when the users left the Lumosity, to what triggers them to return, to their experience with Lumosity on their returning day.

Additionally, this work was used within my specific team to help guide project direction for the return user experience. I used the research to create a set of design principles, then held workshops and brainstorms with our PM, engineers, data science, marketing, and QA to discuss how to translate these themes into features that could improve the experience (Figures 6 & 7).

Figure 5: Select slides from the Synthesis Deck

Figure 6: Select slides used for discussion in workshops

Figure 7: Leading team workshops around research findings — **Figure 7:** Leading team workshops around research findings

REFLECTION

I strongly advocated to conduct research on resurrected users at Lumosity, and am glad I was able to gain enough buy in to conduct a full research phase. We had never addressed these users in the past, and the insights learned were integral to the success of the Resurrections team. This research helped us develop our roadmap and project direction for the entire year, helping improve the return user experience in terms of retention, and improving free user conversion by 10x.

Here are some of the projects that resulted from this research.