As one of the few non-engineers at Bump, my post will include no snippets of code, talk of voltage levels, or anything too nerdy. Instead, I’ll talk about my experience this summer doing a ton of user research and helping the team gather data around understanding how users use Bump. And about happy hours in San Francisco. More on that later…

In my old job as a consultant, I spent a lot of time at large companies trying to figure out how to best navigate the layers of red tape and bureaucracy required to get decisions made. Thankfully, at Bump, product decisions are data-driven and backed up through A/B testing and user research, which is where I, as an MBA intern, come in.

During my first year at the Kellogg School of Management, I took a number of classes in marketing, such as market research, technology marketing and information and technology-based marketing.  These classes prepared me well for my research, which required me to generate surveys, analyze the results, and do some “in the field” research as well. And by “the field”, I mean “the bars”.

Over the past few weeks, I’ve been busy talking to strangers at different bars in San Francisco (during both happy hours and late at night), asking them about Bump, watching them use the app and buying them drinks in return for a few minutes of their time. Though all this sounds like a job that’s too good to be true (please don’t wake me), in reality I’ve also been discovering a lot of interesting insights about how Bump is used “in the wild”, and have been able to share these insights with the Bump team. These observations, in combination with the data-crunching abilities of our data team, have been able to provide our designers and founders with strong support for making big changes to Bump.

For example, though most people around the office are comfortable with the fist-bump motion, only 50% of people observed actually did this. Everyone else came up with a plethora of creative, but less efficient, ways of bumping hands/phones together. Some people tapped their phones together, some tried to beam information to each other, and the most creative rammed their phones together like bumper cars on the surface of a bar. This insight has led to a number of different ideas about how we can better educate and inform users about the bumping motion, and how we can correct users who aren’t bumping properly, to hopefully provide a better, more enjoyable experience for users, every time.