Learning new tricks with qualitative user research

Who’s a good boy?

The American Kennel Club (AKC), one of the world’s original kennel clubs recognizing over 200 dog breeds, approached us with a broad set of goals and expectations for how they imagined their digital products might evolve alongside their growing brand and ecosystem. Key among these goals was uncovering the “why” in the early journey of dog owners, dog sport participants, and dog breeders. What do they expect from the AKC?

We took an exploratory approach by conducting discovery workshops with AKC stakeholders to gain a better understanding of the problem landscape. Our team also received a wealth of quantitative data in the form of Google Analytics, survey data, and access to feedback & support tickets. Still, we needed to dig deeper into understanding the user’s relationship with AKC’s product set, such as AKC.org, Marketplace, dog registration, and more.

Getting a fresh perspective (in color!)

Goji was in a fantastic position as outsiders to look into a well-established organization and help them identify which of their perceived challenges and problems needed more qualitative insights. We used much of our initial workshops to help uncover those problems so we might research them further.

We also established the three primary personas that interface with the AKC and uncovered their assumed goals, motivations, pain points, and user journeys. During our research, we would establish what else happens in these journeys and if AKC’s perceptions of them rang true.

Our last order of business before beginning the research was to help the stakeholders align on which problems and challenges are most important to them. We identified strategic topics to potentially focus our research efforts on, then aligned on a more narrow scope by creating Objectives and Key Results (OKRs), establishing the unknowns and risks of each, and a plan to immediately start tackling each of them.

What’s a registered purebred dog, anyways?

The registration of a purebred dog (or litter) with the AKC is one of their key performance indicators. However, it quickly became clear that there are misconceptions about what registering a dog means and the value it might provide to a dog owner. Could we identify places in the website and customer journey where the communication of that value breaks down? What factors could be a barrier to registration? Our research plan included several additional problems or questions we wanted to dive into:

1. What do users expect from AKC?
2. Users are confused by the AKC ecosystem
   • It’s difficult to navigate AKC.org
   • The barrier to dog sports & events is too high
   • Engaging an audience of young professionals in dog sports & events
3. Do users understand and find AKC registration valuable?

Finding answers would require mostly qualitative research methods. We conducted a website audit of AKC.org and AKC Marketplace, moderated usability tests with a typical journey based on our findings from Google Analytics, card sorting tests to better understand the difficulties of their navigation, and user interviews to dig into customer behaviors and perceptions.

What do users expect from AKC?

When conducting our usability tests and user interviews, we revealed a primary touch point (or two) for each persona type that was their primary expectation. We discovered what came before a dog owner, sports participant, and breeder’s customer journey with the AKC. Later, we cross-synthesized these findings with our other research methods to reveal if these expectations are being met.

We learned from our usability tests and interviews that potential new dog owners are seeking validation for a dog breed choice they’ve made from an in-person experience. After validating that this breed is right for them, they seek out a reputable breeder. Their expectations were met in the former but left wanting for the latter.

Per our user interviews, dog sport participants partially had their expectations met. They could find dog spots and events to participate in but were provided with little to no guidance on the dense terminology surrounding dog shows.

Lastly, breeders were quite happy with their transactional relationship with registering their litters. They did have very different opinions about the incentives for them to encourage new dog owners to also register a transfer of ownership.

Users are confused by the AKC ecosystem

There was a perception amongst our stakeholders that the AKC.org website was difficult to navigate and likely led to a lack of user education on the product offerings. Our research found that was true, but there was a more systemic issue: difficult terminology for new users and novices. We struggled with our site audit to understand the nomenclature and found our usability test participants doing the same. Unprompted, our user interview participants also expressed frustration with the terminology in the “dog world.”

In our card sorting tests, we also uncovered more natural ways users are categorizing items found on AKC.org’s navigation. As such, we suggested incremental changes to the navigation in the short-term, such as reorganizing existing sections, using more descriptive taxonomy, and designing more landing pages, to align more with the patterns we identified from this data. But ultimately, the data confirmed the assumption we had from our discovery workshops – an overhaul to the structure and design of the navigation was eventually necessary.

Jumping hurdles to dog sports & events

We revealed some of the barriers to dog sports & events from the perspective of our interview participants. One of the largest compounding problems was that trainers were the gateway to finding out about sports and who to contact to start training for them. Essentially, a mentor is required (or at least highly recommended) for “breaking in” as a newbie. When users can’t find mentorship in a trainer, they’ll often look to breed clubs. The AKC currently under-supports both finding a trainer and finding breed clubs, so we made several recommendations to provide products or services to both.

Our interviews further uncovered some of why younger adults aren’t participating in dog sports and events in as high numbers as age 60+ users: time, money, and the “fancy” culture of dog shows. We also learned what some breed clubs are having success with for drawing in Millennials and Gen Z in the form of hosting smaller, more action-oriented dog sport events. AKC is also not as well represented in the “entry-level” dog sports world and seen as the “big leagues.”

Do users understand the value of registering their dog with the AKC?

In general, most of our interview and usability test participants were unsure what registering their dog with the AKC meant. They understood if their dog was registered but were often confused by the various flows to get there. More importantly, we uncovered that they weren’t always using the benefits you could add or were included with the registration (such as microchipping the dog, a free month of pet insurance, etc.).

Mixed breed owners often felt left out. There is a path for registering a mixed breed with a program called “Canine Partners” but it’s often unclear to users that it’s an option– Likely an issue with the name of the service and the association of the AKC with purebred dogs.

We also uncovered that these mixed-breed owners were choosing to register their dogs elsewhere, such as with the United Kennel Club. They would attend their dog sports and events instead since they would not have to spay or neuter their unrecognized purebred or mixed-breed. This could impact the AKC’s market share and growth.

Making the research actionable moving forward

Armed with our key research findings, we prepared a presentation deck and walked the AKC stakeholders through what we found, what we recommended, and proposed next steps. For each key finding, we presented a low effort and high effort recommendation and broke down a few ideas of how each effort might work.

For example, our recommendations for “the barrier to dog sports & events is too high” was to improve the existing glossary on the website to include more sorting, filters, and the ability to search. This of course was informed by the finding that the dog world lingo was difficult to understand for new users.

We followed up with our research findings and recommendations by providing estimates for the AKC to potentially pursue some of the suggested efforts and continue our partnership in helping the AKC users have a better experience.