When is an Insight an Insight?

By Kezia Jenissa | UNI.CORN, Team 2

June 15, 2016

Since we started with DBS UNI.CORN, we’ve been tasked with trying to reduce the reliance of using physical cash in transactions. Approaching this similar to a startup, we’ve been focused on trying to discover what the real issue was and how customers thought about this issue so we could better define the issue.

What we learnt during our discovery phase

We spent the past month identifying who are the key stakeholders we needed to reach out to followed by speaking to them. The goal of doing this was to collect enough clues to understand our target group better.

Interviews conducted had to be positioned carefully. What we realised was that asking prepared questions directly may not be ideal to uncover insightful information. Most people can’t think about the questions deeply if we just throw questions at them out of the blue. After few times of trying, we refined out the interview styles to be a more personalised conversation and to help our interviewees feel relaxed.

This resulted in them talking more, being more open to sharing. This was immensely helpful, we were able to get answers to some questions we were trying to address, but we also heard unexpected but interesting stories.

Eventually we successfully collected hundreds of responses from more than 50 people that we spoke to.

Going back to the drawing board – insight develop requires redefining how we gather information

As with approaching any business problem, we are glad that we spent more time on talking and listening to people. This is often the most crucial step to help us learn more about the wants and desires of the people who we are trying to help.

Having gathered all their responses, the next step was to consolidate these ideas so we could analyse all the opportunities and concepts that could be considered. And that’s where we realised we needed to redefine our approach.

The following were some of the more common responses we got:

I’m more used to using cash to pay as a habit

I might overspend if I get a credit card to make payments
I often use credit cards
I try to avoid using credit cards when travelling, you end up having to pay more for the currency exchange and it’s hard keep track of all the bills that are charged to the card. Sometimes my cards also don’t work overseas

While we felt that these were good starting points, we realised we needed to target a more specific customer group to solve these problems. This meant redefining our learnings.

In order to find more practical and deep insights, we decide to target two specific customer groups, namely the Mass Market Family Focused Group and the Emerging Affluent Group.

Mass Market Family Focused Group:
These individuals are typically married, belong to the age range from 30 to 45 years old, earn a monthly income below $5000, and may likely not have a high level education.

Emerging Affluent City Dwellers Group:
These individuals are often single, belong to the age range from 22 to 35 years old, earn a monthly income above $2500 if they are younger than 30 years old or above $5000 if they are above 30 years old, and likely have a busy working style.

A new starting point

This helped us to develop three hypothesis.

Firstly, people make choices based on trust

Secondly, people think financial complexity is crippling

Thirdly, people use cash for predicted expenses in their monthly spending

Using these as a base to further define the main challenges, we believe we can be more intentional in solving more specific problems for our target groups.

In summary, we always have to dig deeper and become more specific to uncover clues to help us develop stronger insights. We have to ask constantly ourselves, is our insight deep enough. Two questions that we kept going back to to guide us – Is this an insight that we can learn purely from interviews? Is the insight discovered surprising enough?

We’re still learning more about this but really want to thank our mentors for their guidance and feedback to help us go further. It’s been a great learning journey and next week we’re focusing on ideation which will help us use the insights and observations we’ve gathered.
Really looking forward to it.

#INSIGHTS #LEARNINGJOURNEY

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

KEZIA JENISSA

Kezia is an undergraduate student from NTU school of Electronic and Electrical Engineering, majoring in Information Engineering and Media. Her passion lies in art, design and media and she’s now an accomplished graphic designer. She is expanding on her skillsets to learning more about UI design, web design and product design. She is not afraid to explore new things and learn through her failures and successes. Kezia is also an adventurer and nature lover who prefers mountains rather than spending time in a shopping mall.