WWW… Wednesday! Pensieve: AI-Powered User Insights

by Taylor Slattery | October 11, 2021

For startups, there’s nothing more valuable than user insights. As designers, we tend to suffer from tunnel vision. We end up spending so much time with a project that we lose the ability to view it objectively. Insights from third parties provide a valuable look at the user experience of someone approaching the product for the first time.

These insights can help us to identify pain points that we may not have considered as well as to discover new market opportunities unmet by the offerings of current solutions. Using this information to inform our decision-making ensures that our customer’s and user’s needs are better met. As we revisit our work we can use these insights to make better products and improve our services.

While user insights are valuable to all sorts of businesses, they are of particular value to service-based products, like apps and websites, which serve as the sole point of interaction with customers. Any issues experienced in these situations are likely to go unnoticed because, upon difficulty, the visitor will most likely choose to leave the site rather than get in touch and inform anyone.

Without knowledge of this bug in the process, the team may be incorrectly led to believe that the issues causing their lack of conversions lie in the copy or the imagery, while the real culprit remains unnoticed. This can cause havoc for any business and the only way to prevent it is either through benevolent customers or extensive testing.

Collecting user insights can be tricky. You may not have a sizable enough user-base to generate meaningful insights, or not know how to get in touch. Pensieve, an AI-powered user research tool makes it easy. Using either your own audience or Pensieve’s network, you can conduct user interviews that make your users feel heard and arm yourself with the knowledge to make the products they really want.

The process begins with a roadmap where you outline the insights you aim to achieve and the questions you hope will get you there. This is a valuable space to explore tangents and connect dots beyond just the surface of the problem in order to find the questions that will bring your desired insights to light.

Next, you’ll schedule interviews with participants, which is where Pensieve’s true magic is on full display. During the interview, you can record video or audio, which can then be transcribed for note-taking and organization in real-time. These notes can be color-coded to better visualize patterns as they emerge and once you’ve finished your interviews, Pensieve generates a presentation-ready report for sharing with your team.

Right now, Pensieve is in private beta. You can learn more and try it out for yourself here.

Taylor is the Managing Editor of Notes on Design. Taylor is a graphic designer, illustrator, and Design Lead at Weirdsleep.

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