Qualitative user research of a cycling community
Scope
To research an online community and observe their behaviors to gather insights from the qualitative data through user research.
The Team
This was part of an assignment at 10kDesigners and was carried out by a team of two members.
Shashank Ranganath
Tanvi Rusia
Timeline
This research was carried out in a period of 16 days.
Why we chose an online cycling community?
Most of us who have cycled in India, see or reminisce cycling as one of the purer joys of our lives. For many of us, cycling was one of the first occasions in our childhood where we had experienced pure freedom and wanderlust.
In the last year and a half, there was a spike of 300% to 400% increase in sales for cycles due to the pandemic. This piqued our interest to research on online cycling community and their behaviors.
Cycling is a great networking activity. In the past decade, India has seen a huge emergence of cycling clubs or groups.
Online Communities that we interacted with :
Facebook community — CYCLOP
CYCLOP is an online private Facebook community for cyclists to buy and sell used cycles and gear among each other. This is also a platform for cycling talk, seeking, and giving advice. Since the community started in 2012, they’ve also developed an eCommerce store — cyclop. in and offer bicycle shipping service as well on the website.
Currently, the cyclop community has around 62K+ members which include 2 admins and 4 active moderators.
“Our rate of new members has gone up about five times since June, Many new, first-time cyclists of all ages, 16 to 50 years old, are joining the group looking for ways other than gyms to stay fit during the Covid crisis. Families are now cycling together instead of going for movies!”
— Cyclops founder Malavika Jain
Cycle and more (CAM)
CAM is a WhatsApp group formed by a group of techies in 2010. They constantly motivate each other to cycle to work and organize meetups during the weekends.
Inside the Facebook community
As cyclop is a private group, you need to accept the group rules before entering the community.
Our first step was to observe how this community works.
These posts were monitored by the moderators and the group topics like #bicycleneeded, #bycyclesalepost, #accessorycomponentneeded were updated frequently.
I had been part of a cycling group in my locality and used to take part in meetups and activities during the weekends. The pandemic brought a huge paradigm shift in these activities which led to the online communities becoming more active than ever. Cycling being a physical activity, we were curious and excited to come up with the below objectives and hypotheses for our research.
Objective
Understand user behavior in the cycling (CYCLOP) community to create digital products/ideas that help them to be motivated and inspired to cycle as a form of fitness.
Possible hypotheses
- Individuals who are a part of online cycling communities have a higher chance of sticking to goals and forming healthy habits.
- Cycling in gyms or at home is not as effective as cycling with peers from an online cycling meetup.
Let’s deep dive into the community
Our primary research methodology was user interviews.
We have also analyzed the raw qualitative data obtained from the user interviews into patterns and developed them into user personas and experience mapping.
👨👨👧👧 User Interviews
For further inputs about cyclop, we decided to conduct few user interviews. Since this was a Facebook community, we could connect to some of our mutual friends who were also part of the group. For other users, we approached by texting few community members.
Participant criteria :
Participants should be
- a member of the Cyclop community on Facebook for at least 6 months.
- between 20–50 years old
- other local WhatsApp groups
Some quotes from the participants :
Narasimha :
You don’t have to plan a lot if you have community or group support. So, they post saying ride at 5 am tomorrow, and these are the kilometres that we are trying to ride. Basically, you will be presented with some information so that helps you make a decision, or get to the starting point.
So Bangalore, specifically talking about Bangalore, cycling alone is still not a safe thing. So all these roads doesn’t have like a dedicated lane. Not everybody is educated to kind of do that for the cyclists right so having that group will definitely act as a support system, and there has been accidents like I’ve been in the group where somebody fell due to bad roads, I myself have fallen many times and hurt myself.
Mohit :
People outside don’t appreciate cycling that much. Being part of this community, reading similar stories of other cyclists helps me mentally.
Mayank :
Cyclop as a crew is something which I’ve been enjoying because, you know, is in helping me improve my knowledge about cycling. And, you know, helping me get in touch with other cyclists, all this, you know memes and all that also keep happening sometimes in between so I just enjoy.
I never paid attention to stuff like cadence, speed, Elevation gains, and all that, but now I at least try, you know, pushing myself a little bit more to you know to be able to test that, you know, average speed, the good average speed on the amount and by trying to break my previous record.
Jarul :
If there were occasional gatherings or online meetings, wherein, you get to meet people interact with people in person. Then it would be a bit better, but I know I mean, as a because being an online community, it’s very difficult to handle such a large group, but they can have, like the regional or the local meetings.
Analyzing the Qualitative data
We followed the method of Thematic analysis to find patterns in the raw data gained from the user interviews. Each color represents a participant. The data from the user interviews is coded i.e. grouped under the labels that they belong to and some common patterns are identified by further digging into the coded data as shown below.
Key insights from our user interviews
User persona
From the patterns observed and the user interviews conducted we have created some user personas.
Experience mapping
Since our research is not tied to any product we decided to create an experience mapping of the user in his journey of buying a cycle to discovering a cycling community to being motivated and mentoring other young cyclists.
Using the research to improve the community experience
From the experience mapping of participants, we have a generalized view of a user’s experience with both online and local communities. Below are some of the ideas or suggestions to improve the user’s experience in the communities to keep them motivated to cycling and fitness :
- The criteria for someone to join the group must be better.
- A curated list of the latest cycles and their parts is very much necessary as there is a lot of info in the community. This can be published weekly or monthly so that everyone is up to date.
- The support system during longer rides like jeeps with medical aid and mentoring by senior cyclists is of utmost importance and this has to be standardized in every city group to encourage young people to take up cycling as a form of fitness.
- Switch easily between the online store and the community.
- Separate groups Professional cyclists and experts who are on a different level than a novice in terms of technical knowledge, riding capability, competitiveness, and fitness goals.
- Bringing multiple platforms like What’s app and Strava together. Voice channels in the cycling apps to discuss the cycling meetups would make it easier to plan meetups and rides.
- Scheduling assistant and templates to easily schedule, remind and update the details of an upcoming ride in our calendars.
- Occasional local gatherings or online meetings to keep the group motivated.
- SOS has to be integrated into the cycling apps and quickly notify nearby members or other cyclists in case of emergency when riding alone.
📚 Learnings ….
As this assignment was part of 10kDesigners, I realized the importance of having a community not just for learning but also for businesses that create a brand experience for the users. Business communities that satisfy both relational and transactional needs will reap the benefits of greater customer loyalty and may gain important insights into the nature and needs of their customer base. I am sharing some of my learnings during my research and hopefully, it will help you.
👨🏾💻 User interviews
- It is important to prepare your questions for the user interviews beforehand. Remember that questions are just guidelines for you to be on track. You can alter the order of the questions themselves during the interview process to make the user more comfortable.
- Try to engage the user in his local language (If you know the language) to make him more comfortable during the interview.
- Select diverse participants i.e ranging from new to an expert in the community who are active about the subject in discussion.
- Record the interview for future reference and try to use an app that transcribes automatically. Saves a lot of your time.
🧠 Analysis of Qualitative data
- Break down the raw qualitative data from the interviews into coded data. Thematic Analysis is one of the best ways of analyzing huge raw qualitative data into structured data.
- Experience Maps and Customer journey Maps are two different mapping techniques used for different purposes.
- Experience Mapping is used to get a generalized broad view of what a user experiences in his journey of activity like Cycling in India or Rail journey in Europe.
- Customer Journey Mapping is used for a specific task performed by a user or for using a specific product.
👨👨👧👧 Community
- Observation and listening to people is a very under-valued skill and can be most effective when it comes to gathering qualitative data during user research.
- It was surprising to see that the users came up with so many ideas to improve the community experience.
- We all love to hear and tell stories. Some of the users were happy to express themselves as it was a walk through the memory lane of their cycling journey.
- The balance of using online platforms and physical activities to connect with people is of utmost importance for one to be motivated in the long run and be a pillar of support to others who are starting.
👋 Thank you for reading the case study. Means a lot to me.
🤝Do feel free to reach out to me on Linkedin or Twitter for any feedback, discussions, or collaborations, I’d be more than happy to have a chat with you!
References :
- Knowledge and Communities By Eric Lesser, Michael Fontaine, Jason Slusher
2. Thematic Analysis by NN Group :
How to Analyze Qualitative Data from UX Research: Thematic Analysis
3. Experience mapping — A Step-by-Step Guide by JD Jones :
Experience Mapping — A Step-by-Step Guide by JD Jones (UX Burlington 2018)
