UX and Market Research: Insights Across Industries

Challenge

Conduct UX and market research for three simulated retail and e-commerce clients, producing actionable insights and industry-standard deliverables to guide product and business decisions.

Overview

In summer 2025, I completed the Erdős Institute UX Research Bootcamp, a hands-on program teaching participants how to apply quantitative and qualitative research to real-world product and business challenges. The capstone was a team-based project simulating UX and market research scenarios for three fictional clients:

  • Explorer Beans: A coffee shop on the Ohio State University campus weighing a proposal to add late-night hours and alcohol sales.
  • Shoptronics: An electronics e-commerce site aiming to reduce shopping cart abandonment.
  • EarthKiss: A cosmetics retailer investigating the root causes of membership churn.

This experience gave me the opportunity to adapt my skills in research design to a UX and business context, producing deliverables common in industry settings — such as customer personas, journey maps, and usability scenarios — while collaborating on strategic insights that could guide product and business decisions.

My Role

UX researcher (team of three): As part of a three-member team, I contributed across all three challenges:

  • Shoptronics: Created three age-diverse customer personas based on audience segmentation and pain points revealed through hypothetical user interviews, focus groups, and usability testing.
  • EarthKiss: Designed a 17-question customer survey in Qualtrics and a data analysis plan to pinpoint internal vs. external factors driving membership churn.

Tools

Qualtrics Canva

Insights and Impact

Top project award: Our work was recognized with top project honors by bootcamp staff for its rigor and actionable recommendations.

Key insights: While the data and scenarios were largely hypothetical, we approached each challenge as if advising real stakeholders, translating data into clear insights:

  • Explorer Beans: Analysis showed that the market for late-night alcohol-and-coffee service was largely untapped. Of 9 nearby coffee shops, only two served alcohol, and just one was open until midnight or later. While the SWOT analysis identified licensing and staffing as significant challenges, the concept showed strong potential for profitability and ROI.
  • Shoptronics: The three personas highlighted common frustrations leading to cart abandonment: unexpected shipping fees during the checkout process, mandatory account creation, and site navigation issues.
  • EarthKiss: The survey questions targeted both current and former members to test hypotheses about churn. Insights were expected to reveal that internal factors such as inflexible membership plans and inconsistent customer service were bigger churn drivers than external market pressures. An A/B test of a flexible six-month membership plan was proposed to increase retention.

Significance: This project strengthened my ability to translate traditional research skills into UX and product insights. It also expanded my experience with industry-standard deliverables and reinforced the importance of cross-functional team collaboration.

Team Deliverables