Democratizing user research within Novo's product, design and marketing teams

Building a financial platform for small business with the power of continuous research
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Novo is a fintech platform that offers financial solutions for SMBs and entrepreneurs, bringing simplicity and innovation to managing and growing a business.
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Novo's product, design and UX team partners with Hubble to find B2B participants for various kinds of user feedback, including product concept tests, marketing research, pricing analysis and many others. We interviewed Steph Lusby, Novo's Director of UX Design, discussing how Hubble has helped their team to collect research insights from their target personas for various crucial product and marketing initiatives.  

“It's been invaluable to use Hubble to help us find people that are starting a business or are running a business, giving us insights into what problems they run into when they are running their businesses and what we can prioritize when building."

^{Stephanie Lusby, Director of Product Design at Novo}

Could you please introduce yourself and Novo?
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Hi! I’m Stephanie Lusby, and I lead the product design team at Novo. Novo is a banking platform for self-employed individuals and small businesses. The SMB banking market is very underserved and the financial needs of a small business are drastically different versus that of a more established business. Our mission is to create a financial platform that is suitable for an individual that is trying to build, maintain and grow their business.

How did you conduct user research before adopting Hubble?
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Mostly, we relied on recruiting Novo customers for research and feedback. At Novo, we believe in the value of continuously collecting feedback from users, so we would run moderated sessions and unmoderated research by recruiting our own customers as participants.

What were some of the difficulties and challenges you encountered?
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Recruiting always takes time and resources especially when you are busy in the middle of a sprint. We are a fast moving team, and we don't have a dedicated UXR group within Novo, so many of the designers and product managers have to be responsible for recruiting their own users and participants for moderated and unmoderated research.

How has Hubble impacted your team's user research?
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Hubble has become the unifying tool that is used by our product, UX and marketing teams for user research. We really love how user friendly it is and how straightforward it is for various parties to build research and synthesize results through you guys' platform. For this reason, we've been democratizing user research across the org, empowering designers, marketers and product managers to source participants, build studies and analyze results.
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When we were increasing our contract, everybody was raising their hand to get seats and access to participants, which is a great sign that shows how Hubble has become such an important component of our product development process.

In terms of output, there are various types of user & market research that we were able to produce via Hubble. This quarter, we ran a jobs-to-be-done analysis, a product marketing research to hone down our marketing personas, various prototype research with some of the new features that we are building and a willingness to pay analysis for various features that we are planning to launch within our suite of products.  

Novo's marketing updates based on insights from marketing research conducted via Hubble.

What is the value of talking to customers continuously as you are continuing to improve your product?
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So our product team members don't actually use the Novo product in their day to day lives so it's sometimes easy to miss what it feels like to be a business owner. Specifically understanding what their daily workflows look like when they are trying to pay bills, manage their cash and control their expenses. Unless you are constantly talking to your customers and re-aligning, it's easy to fall into the trap of building things that you think users want, but when you actually dive in you realize that there are more pressing problems, that are higher priority than what you were initially trying to build. As the product organization grows and there are various pods and initiatives that are ongoing, it's sometimes easy to lose track of what is most important for the customer.

We have this one project that comes to my mind, that we have been exploring whether it would be worth building into our suite of products. The idea came from a series of customer service tickets that continuously came up. To validate the idea, we used Hubble to find our target personas and conduct research to gage if this is actually something that would be worth investing in. As shown in this case, Hubble has been helping us in establishing our roadmap, and prioritizing where we should allocate resources to drive the highest impact.

How do you expect to use Hubble in the future?
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We have been really delighted to have Hubble as a user research solution to consistently collect insights from both our own users as well as your B2B participants. Our entire product and design team is aware of what Hubble offers and will continue to tap into Hubble for various types of unmoderated and moderated research. Really excited to continue to partner with you guys.
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Any tip or advice for companies that are looking to try out Hubble?
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I would say to take full advantage of the templates as well as some of the reserch advice and help that the Hubble team can provide. We really love you guys' expertise and amazing customer support as many of our team members don't have direct experience with user research. I would also say that run tests with the participant recruitment to see which screener questions and filters yield the best results!

"Hubble has been instrumental in establishing our roadmap, testing our assumptions and and prioritizing where we should allocate resources to drive the highest value for our customers."
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^{Steph Lusby, Director of Product Design at Novo}