GOTPHOTO: A PARENT'S JOURNEY
"They just grow up way too fast!"
The project
Company
GotPhoto
Online shop system for school and nursery photographers, serving two user groups: photographers (B2B) and parents (B2C).
Online shop system for school and nursery photographers, serving two user groups: photographers (B2B) and parents (B2C).
Role
Customer Journey Manager
Responsible for the B2C area of the product, and therefore the overall experience of parents when buying school and nursery photos online.
Responsible for the B2C area of the product, and therefore the overall experience of parents when buying school and nursery photos online.
Task
Understand & empathise
Empathise with parents and understand why parents buy nursery photos of their children in order to visualise their journey.
Empathise with parents and understand why parents buy nursery photos of their children in order to visualise their journey.
What makes this task challenging?
Reaching out to parents
As the shop system is a white label solution and each photographer uses their own individual shop, it was quite challenging to directly reach out to parents.
Not only because of GDPR-regulations, but also to not just interfere with the photographers customers, I always had to get their permission first to be able to reach out to their customers ‒ the parents.
What did I do to gain useful insights?
Lots of talking, exploring, testing, and data
Talked to colleagues from different departments about their experiences with school/nursery photos and our system.
Talked to photographers to better understand their touch points with parents.
Asked parents themselves to understand better why they buy school/nursery photos in general and whether they already do so online.
Conducted an online survey in parental Facebook groups.
Checked internal usage data, such as funnel analyses, conversion rates, and bounce rates.
Participated in a photo day at a nursery to get a better impression of the process.
Used the shop interface myself and ordered test photos.
So... Why do parents buy?
"A timestamp in pictures"
Parents are proud of their children and how they develop! Therefore nursery photos are a very emotional product that enables them to capture the steps of their children growing up.
Nursery photos are a reflection of the moment, and moreover a moment you can't capture yourself as a parent because you are not there when your child makes their very own experiences in kindergarten.
Other than that school and nursery photos are often bought for the family as well, e.g. as gift for the grandparents.
The younger children are, the more important it is for parents to keep track of their progress, especially when it's their first child.
The older children get, the less interested their parents are in these kind of photos, they don't change that fast anymore; besides puberty is very present.
School photography is more difficult than nursery photography since parents can no longer be reached directly for photo day reminders, or any further info.
Further findings
Who's our potential user? What's their journey?
Meet Sandra, our primary persona
Sandra Meinhardt is 34 years old, married, and works as editor in Hamburg. And she has a son, Lasse. He is 2 years old and her pride and joy!
It's photo day
Since children are growing so fast, Sandra and her husband would love to capture every possible moment of Lasse. It is Lasse's first year at nursery and he is integrating so well.
In the beginning it wasn't easy to let him go, to leave him at the nursery and to let him make his own experiences. He is just 2, but already becomes a little human with his own character.
The idea behind this journey map, or more flow, was to create a working document, which includes as well key metrics such as conversion and bounce rate for the most important touchpoints throughout the parent's journey ‒ from everything that happens before photo day over accessing the online album to the actual order placement and after care. A "traffic light" color system would make visible at first glance which touchpoint performs well and which doesn't.
To keep it compact, I decided to show only the core of my map.
A journey
Main learnings & possible next steps
Think big, present compact
The main learning was that an in-depth journey is very useful for 'internal' purposes. If you want to bring also other teams closer to the user's journey, you need a compact and easy to digest version.
Onsite Feedback & funnel analysis
Possible next steps are to attend more photo days with parents present to gather onsite feedback, as well as to invite parents to focus groups and look deeper into internal data sources, where available.
Broaden & refine demographics
In order to best represent the majority of users, it would be necessary to create further personas. Based on available user data, different sociodemographic aspects and buying behaviour, depending on wether it's an urban or rural family, number of children, financial backgrounds, devices and connection to the internet.