Transactional
to Trusted
How a 360° foundational study evolved a marketplace from a short-term matchmaking tool into an indispensable, long-term partner, and became the backbone of the 2026 company strategy.
Researcher
+ Business Synthesis
+ 800 surveys
Sep 2025
2026 strategy
A strategic threat,
not a usability bug.
We were the market leader, but growth in our most valuable segments had gone flat. Our brand promised trust; the on-platform experience was inconsistent, and churn followed. I saw a systemic issue: we were operating as a transactional tool, not the indispensable partner we aspired to be.
This wasn't a collection of usability problems. It was a vicious cycle inside a two-sided marketplace, and my task was to diagnose it.
How do we evolve from a short-term matchmaking service into an indispensable, long-term partner that fosters trust and stability for the entire ecosystem?
The vicious cycle inside a
two-sided marketplace.
Caregiver instability
Cancellations, ghosting, and income volatility push the best caregivers off the platform.
Family dissatisfaction
The remaining care pool gets less reliable. Families churn or rate the experience as untrustworthy.
Caregivers leave
Worsening reviews, lower demand, and platform friction drive more high-quality caregivers off the system.
Deep empathy + statistical confidence.
To tackle a problem this complex, I needed both. The goal: build a holistic, 360° view of users to guide the upcoming roadmap. I started with three guiding questions:
- What are the primary unmet needs of families and caregivers after the initial match is made?
- Where is the disconnect between our brand's promise of trust and the actual user experience?
- What specific features and services would increase retention and create long-term value?
Qualitative discovery
60+ minute deep-dives to find the raw stories, emotions, and Jobs-to-be-Done quantitative data can't reveal.
Quantitative validation
MaxDiff-driven surveys that force trade-offs and rank value propositions at statistically significant scale.
Business synthesis
Weave UXR findings with existing business data into a single strategic narrative leadership could act on.
Three strategic pillars.
Synthesis revealed the problems weren't isolated incidents, they were interconnected symptoms of three underlying issues. I framed each as a strategic pillar so the business could act on them.
The Trust Paradox
Marketplace Imbalance
Value after the match
How I used AI to synthesize this study.
I fed 1,000+ qualitative data points and three quantitative streams into a secure LLM workspace to surface thematic clusters, draft the executive narrative, and pressure-test the strategic implications.
The result: an AI-generated executive summary stakeholders could digest in six minutes, paired with the full deck for teams going deeper.
Listen below, this is the same artifact ELT used to scope the 2026 pillars.
Two new company-wide
strategic pillars.
Fix the Foundation.
A company-wide initiative to make trust tangible with verifiable credentials and to rebuild the core matching experience.
Expand the Value.
A new, significant investment in scheduling, payments, and backup care, the tooling that lives after the match.
“This research gave us the clarity and confidence to make bold bets for 2026. It's become the foundation of our product strategy.”
UXR as a strategic partner, not a reporter.
This study didn't just identify pain points, it provided a rigorous, evidence-based vision for the company's future. It cemented UXR's role as an essential strategic partner in the organization.
Both new company-wide pillars came directly from this work, and now guide product development across teams.
Two-sided trust is universal.
Trust research in two-sided marketplaces is structurally equivalent to trust research in enterprise vendor relationships, AI-powered decision tools, and B2B platform adoption.
The dual mental-model framework I built here, mapping the distinct credibility signals for each side of a marketplace, applies anywhere buyer and seller (or user and AI) hold asymmetric information and asymmetric risk.