User analysis panoramio.com (photos on Google Maps)

Problem

As a result of an earlier satisfaction survey, user requirements for an optimal community experience in Panoramio were to be collected. The questions to be answered were

How can the community experience in Panoramio be optimized?
What are the requirements for an optimal community experience in Panoramio?
and What are the differences between the current and the optimal community experience?

Approach

In order to obtain more detailed information about community definitions and about perceived advantages and disadvantages of the current product solution compared to the previous questionnaire study, it was decided to use the survey method. Two groups of very active users in 10 countries were recruited for the interviews:

Group 1 (11 people) very active in the forum
Group 2 (10 persons) not or only slightly actively involved in the forum

Result

Three user-personas could be identified through the interviews:

Athos, who is mainly interested in social interaction with people with the same interests in photography and travel;
Porthos, who sees the community as primarily responsible for both content sourcing and keeping the product "clean"; and
Aramis, for whom social exchange is secondary, and who is primarily concerned with creating visibility for his pictures.
Based on these personas, user requirements were isolated and compared to the current product to identify where there is room for improvement for the respective user persona. In a final step, rough recommendations were formulated on how to close these strategic gaps and exploit the potential for an optimal community experience.

Next Steps

The definition of the primary and secondary persona and the determination of the final product strategy were outside the project scope, but were carried out in a final meeting with the Panoramio team and in cooperation with the product management.

Many of the corresponding recommendations will be implemented in the coming quarters. We recommend monitoring success by repeating the satisfaction study and possibly by conducting new surveys.

Approach and methodology - Interview evaluation

The problem that had to be solved during the evaluation was the systematic identification and consolidation of the relevant aspects from a disordered mass of information.

After weighing up various possibilities, the decision was made to use the Affinity Diagram method. Affinity Diagrams are ideal for organizing and evaluating large amounts of textual data and for finding higher-level patterns in these data sets.

For this purpose, core statements and quotes from interviews were collected from post-its. These were then combined into clusters in an affinity diagram on several whiteboards. These clusters were identified as categories. These were found to be relevant for the community experience in a broader sense and named accordingly, e.g. "community definitions", "communication channels used", "relationships with other users", etc.

There are no literary sources for the way from the affinity diagram categories to the personal descriptions. Therefore it was decided to define the procedure itself. The procedure was as follows:

First, each respondent was described using the categories that were created using the affinity diagram. Then each respondent was assigned a color and the category characteristics were printed out in color.

Then matching category attributes were clustered and sorted by color. In this way, three respondent clusters could be identified, some with opposing and some with overlapping characteristics.

Finally, three personas were described from the respondent clusters thus formed with their different characteristics and named after comic figures in Google's internal tradition: Athos, Porthos and Aramis.

For Athos, the exchange with others is central; Porthos sees a main task of the user community in the self-control of content, while Aramis sees other users primarily as an audience for its own images.

The majority of respondents are found in the persona Athos, the rest form the personas Porthos and Aramis.

With the help of a gap analysis, the requirements for each persona were compared to the current product and possible strategic gaps in the product were identified.