By **Kim Steindel -** Senior UX-Product Designer
What are micro case studies?
The immersion case study summarises and displays many different skills and methodologies that you can learn and apply. It touches on the vast majority of standard practices, and it can be relevant to most workplaces. The problem is that it's missing a real business situation, centred around real-world applications. A micro case study is an improvement case study done for a local business, concentrating on a tiny improvement building on an existing product.
How are they structured?
This depends a bit on what you prefer and what skills you’d like to apply in a job, but a typical framework is to take a snapshot of a homepage of a local business and then analyze these two parties:
Example - Plumbing Services Website
Business Objectives
As a business, I want people to give me a call and schedule appointments for services
As a business, I want to make clear what I can help with so that I don't waste time in useless calls
As a business, I want to...
Customer Objectives
As a customer who just had a leak, I want to find emergency information and get someone here before my living room is a swimming pool
As a customer, I want to see the prices of the offered services because money is tight and I'm scared of being taken advantage of
As a customer, I want to....By doing this we'll have enough information to identify user and business needs and to analyze the current user journey on an existing product. We can create proto persona profiles, a user journey map, a business analysis... whatever we want to have to show what and how we're addressing this issue.
What do we do with that information?
We solve the problem. If we identify that a need could be an emergency number we check if that's in line with the business goals and if it is, we check how difficult it is to find that. If the contact details are hidden behind a wall of other information, the business will lose out on that contract and the user will be frustrated and move on. If we can confirm a real need, we will implement that solution into the current design rather than redesigning the complete product.
This works because that's what most companies are doing when iterating on existing products - which is what the majority of them is doing.
What then?
Knock on the business door and show them your improvements and design and give it to them for free. Tell them you're a student and chose their business for a project and you wanted to share your results. Leave your number and email somewhere as well.
Why do this? Quote from our CS Kim who started to develop this:
“Because now - even if you never hear from them - you have real world experience. (Doesn't matter if you got paid) and because there's a surprising number of clients coming back for freelance projects. Roughly 1 out of 5 students comes back to me after this step telling that the business wants to work with them or that the business referred them to someone else and that they're offered a small project. Just yesterday I had a guy in a call who analyzed the accessibility of a website and told them about the shortcomings and they hired him for €500 to write a full report. Just. Like. That.”
A final note
This case study can be done in 2-3 days because of the size. Can't beat time.