6 findings from user research in Seoul Nov 2018

Archive UX and UXR
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Hi all. We wanted to share some quick findings from user research carried out the weekend of November 17-18 in Seoul, South Korea as part of a trip made for a speaking event and a fantastic meetup organized by @Jinho (kudos!) at Nonce in Seoul.

More context: We conducted home visits and coffee chats with 6 participants throughout the Seoul metro area that weekend where 3 participants were prescreened to match a target profile (including holding SNT) and 3 participants were selected from our local community. Each interview lasted 60-90 minutes and while we are still working on a larger set of findings, we wanted to share …

6 key findings you need to know about our current and potential users in South Korea

  1. Speculation/FOMO is a strong motivator for individuals to get into crypto. Perceived lack of alternative means for investments & certain advantages such as purchase accessibility - i.e. buying chunks of crypto - could have led to higher crypto adoption rates.

  2. While speculation is a strong driver among certain users, “believers” see it as a means to empower anonymous/grey market services - e.g. trading banned vaping products.

  3. Cryptocurrency draws surprising parallels to virtual money (gaming or reward points) in terms of the user experience it can offer and therefore is not an unfamiliar concept to many Koreans.

  4. People tend to have multiple tokens/currencies (average of 4 from our set) often stored on digital exchanges and not on hard wallets.

  5. However, actual crypto usage was not wide spread among our participants. The most frequently highlighted use case is cross-border transactions - e.g. sending crypto to my sibling in Japan.

  6. Nearly all participants mentioned finding reliable crypto or blockchain info as a pain point. While users may conduct a lot of research online they ultimately rely on anecdotes to make decisions.

Curious for more? Dive into the deck to see more of our preview on developing profiles aimed at helping us define our audience in a key country.

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Questions? Comments? Feel free to add to the deck or ask here!

Patrick
Hester
Philip

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Thanks for this Patrick- appreciate you sharing. These types of insights are so critical.
I know you and the team are still combing through the data, but I am curious what your thoughts are around similarities between these insights from Korea and other regions of the world. A few of the key findings struck me as potentially being shared across a wider group of crypto investors and ‘believers’— although the individual socio-economic or political circumstances of their lives may vary fairly significantly.

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