Summary

Project: Client, 3 week sprint
Team: Miranda Meldrum, Katie Meyers, Anisah Khokhar

Brief: In Good Company are a tech-for-good start-up on a mission to make it easy for users to find great ethical businesses and experiences. Their web app was in the beta stage and they wanted our team to explore ways to increase engagement and repeat business – both to the app and the businesses listed themselves.

Tools used: Figma, Figjam, Photoshop, Slack, Zoom, double diamond design process.

Methods & Role

Role: Team lead - coordinated our user research, meetings with clients, developers and stakeholders, oversaw the UI design process.

• Conducted 5/12 user interviews and coordinated the affinity mapping of user insights.

• Desk research into gamification, competitor and comparative analysis.

• Planned and led a design studio with 8 stakeholders to kick-start our ideation process

• Wireframing and mid-fidelity design iterations. Final design of the Home, Impact and Rewards Card pages.

• Opened our client presentation and walkthrough of our final prototype.

Outcome

Creation of a high-fidelity prototype that targeted two user motivations: 1) Rewarding visits to businesses, to act as an incentive to return and try new places. 2) Maintaining motivation to be ‘ethical’ by showing the impact they have on good causes. The direct impact of our work:

• Our research identified improvements to the existing web app’s usability and accessibility that the client was able to implement quickly.

• Our app prototype designs will form part of the future native app.

Case study

Kicking off — What was the brief?

‘We want to understand what resonates with users in order to drive deeper engagement, potentially looking at the use of rewards’ In Good Company 

In Good Company  are  a tech for good start up with a mission to make it easy for conscious consumers to find great ethical businesses.

Their web app is currently in beta release, with a native app prototype in early development. In Good Company (IGC) wanted our team to explore ways to increase engagement and repeat custom for their businesses.

‘I want people to feel good about themselves when they use our app and pick somewhere to go’ Alex Birtles, In Good Company Founder

We kicked off the project with CEO and Founder Alex Birtles who outlined what inspired them to create IGC. We also arranged a meeting with their development team who helped us understand the current development pipeline. Our focus would be in creating features for the native app prototype, but throughout our project we sought to also provide IGC with ‘quick’ UI wins to implement on the app. This included suggestions to improve the usability and accessibility of the beta app, based on insights gathered in our research.

Discover — What did we need to find out about our users?

User interviews │ Affinity mapping │ Market research │ Competitive analysis │ Gamification research │ UI Audit │ Accessibility testing

For our research plan we wanted to test our assumptions about the average user and explore how gamification has been used in similar cases to incentivise engagement. We wanted to know, are they more motivated by discounts or something tied to the good causes themselves? Are the expected benefits for logging in worth the effort to them? How do they engage online? What motivates them?

IGC also provided us with extensive market research on their target audience. They tended to be female (75%) eco-conscious but not eco-warrior millennials. Significantly, part of their motivation was also about being seen to do good. To target these users, doing good needed to be made easy.

Good intentions - User interview insights

What did we find out? Users loved the idea behind the app, and saw themselves using it to quickly plan a trip ahead of time, particularly for special occasions. Supporting ethical or ‘good’ businesses is a significant motivation that users said they were willing to commit extra time, money and effort to do. They wanted to help build local communities although they tended to avoid engaging in local online groups. 

However, for all the good intentions they had — when you read between the lines — convenience is still the significant factor in how frequently they visit a business in person or interact online. If it wasn’t already part of their routine, it would take extra incentive to go that extra mile.

For rewards, too, users like earning discounts but, for many, the schemes just became another thing to remember.

“I wish I was better at keeping up with loyalty schemes — but it’s time and effort. Takes too much cognitive energy…”

Experiences of reviewing and sharing online were similar. Only 5/12 users would regularly write reviews and then only after exceptional experiences. The majority considered themselves online ‘lurkers’, despite appreciating reviews to make their own decisions.

On the face of it, users were put off by having to sign in to an account, but digging deeper they wanted to be able to stay up-to-date with local businesses, save favourites and receive recommendations based on their preferences — benefits they expect upon signing up. 

“I love data — I’d like to be able to track the social/environmental impact of my purchases”

Being able to see the direct impact of the actions was really important, and a key factor in how they supported good causes. So, if that initial strong desire to help good causes is there, how can we keep that motivation going and use it to drive engagement?

Gamification — Tracking and rewarding engagement

When effective, gamification increases user engagement through game mechanics. It creates compelling products that appeal to our intrinsic (autonomy, belonging, curiosity, learning, mastery and meaning) and extrinsic (badges, competition, failure, punishment, money) motivations. 

According to Zichermann’s SAPS model of customer rewards, the strongest motivator for users is Status (an intrinsic motivation - user earns a public, visible status). Then Access (unlockable features), Power (earn rank, rights over other users) and Stuff (an extrinsic motivation—items, discounts etc).

The extrinsic rewards are useful in initially attracting users, but maintaining long term engagement needs to target intrinsic motivations. This had us thinking about what different actions IGC could track and reward particular to the motivations we identified in our research.

Competitor analysis identified some interesting examples. TripAdvisor, IGC’s direct competition, are all about user generated reviews and reward users with community status the more they contribute. Apps in a similar sustainability space (Tree App, Too Good To Go) gave users a breakdown of their impact by tracking the estimated CO₂ saved. Olio, a waste-reduction food sharing app, has a badge rewards system for app usage, as well as self-reporting goal setting around progressive targets.

So how could we chose what to gamify on In Good Company’s app? During my own research around this topic I came across this article that helped rephrase our thinking on this.

Questions like “how can I increase app engagement?”…Is the root problem really that engagement isn’t high enough? Unlikely. People may not be using the product because it isn’t helping them reach their goals!

A better question might simply be “how can we design something that helps people reach their goals?”

What did the motivations we identified in our research really tell us about our users goals? What could we help them solve?

Define — What were we really looking to solve?

User personas │ Problem statement │ How might we statements

At the start of week 2 we began defining our user personas - their pain points, goals and needs that would be the basis of our solution. We defined two personas from our user research:

Molly — initially motivated by ethical values but struggles due to time constraints and feeling she has no impact. She needs trustworthy, simple ways to help causes that she can build into her routines. Michelle — any excuse to try a new place. Budget is tight so if there are ways to show she’s helping good causes, while earning a little bonus, all the better.

Molly and Michelle represent two common motivations we identified in the research - the impact seeker and the experience seeker. Whether users were trying to live by their own ethical values (Molly), or just wanted more interesting experiences while appearing to do good (Michelle), circumstances still got in their way. What was really holding back users' engagement with ethical businesses (on or offline)?

• Time constraints — at short notice, users would visit a reliable chain or routine location. New places require research, and then writing reviews takes even more effort.

• Inconvenience — Ethical locations are more spread out, might be slower and less reliable service. While chains are consistent and their loyalty schemes can be used nationwide. 

• Feeling their actions have no impact — What can one individual really do? Why go to the extra effort?

• Difficult to remember — Ethical values are important, but not before cost/enjoyment/location. What else could remind users?

From this we defined our problem statement:

Molly and Michelle need a convenient, enjoyable platform that effortlessly instils trust, so that it is easy for them to stay motivated and engaged in supporting local ethical businesses.

The Overlap :  Business goals + User goals + Values

Good user experience balances the business and user needs. At IGC, their values are also fundamental, and so the ethical businesses themselves are a key part of the equation.

Design — How did our solution develop?

Design studio workshop │ Sketching │ Site-map │ Wire flow │ User flow │ Low-fi │ Mid-fi │ High-fi prototyping │ Usability testing │ Iteration

So how might we make users feel good about doing good? How might we make it easy for them? How might we make users feel part of something?

We knew we wanted to tap into the knowledge of everyone at IGC, so a Design Studio was the first thing I wanted to book in with our clients. It was a brilliant opportunity to speak and brainstorm with those who’ve been involved from the very start as well as the development team responsible for bringing the app to life.

Using our research findings as a prompt, and kicking off with a little doodle ice breaker, the group explored as many ideas for engaging users on the app. Crucially we also gathered great feedback on some ideas our team had been simmering over. 

Afterwards, we performed a feature prioritisation matrix on each feature idea. Considering the scope of our project and our findings so far, we felt the following features would have the strongest impact on users:

• Simple rewards feature - Usable across all listed businesses to encourage repeat business and trying new places. Make it familiar and convenient to schemes users had liked using, with extrinsic rewards like discounts, free menu items etc.

• An impact tracker  -  To inform and motivate users to keep up their support and importantly show they’re a part of a larger community, working together to impact good causes. Something you could share and encourage other users to join.

• Storytelling and onboarding  -  to quickly and clearly explain the value and purpose of the app and the businesses on it.

• Pay it forward  - A way to encourage users to share any rewards they’ve earned back to the IGC community. Tap into their altruistic side, make them feel good for helping.

We created a preliminary user flow for these features that would follow a user signing up, finding a suitable café to visit, opening and scanning the in-app rewards feature and then review the impact of their visit afterwards.

Iteration & Testing

Over the course of 2 days we were able to evolve our scruffy sketches into a testable mid-fidelity prototype of our new features, Rewards and Impact. Both new features would have their own icon on the app’s tab bar.

We tested the prototype on 10 users, a mix of video and in-person tests due to time constraints. You can watch a small sample of two of the in-person tests I conducted below.

Testing provided some valuable insights on what worked, and what hadn’t. The key areas to work on:

• Navigation — as highlighted in the clip above, users struggled with the hierarchy of options in the home screen, feeling like too much at once. The options in the tab bar also went against a familiar muscle memory (“When I go to search, I think — top right!”)

• Rewards onboarding and simplicity — only 50% of users successfully completed the reward task

• UX writing and storytelling — 50% of users mentioned that they needed more information to understand the purpose of the app after the initial splash page.

• Impact dashboard — Users felt it was a nice idea but weren’t clear on the link between their actions and the impact rating.

Delivering the prototype

Our final prototype would integrate our new features with the client’s native app prototype. Since we had gathered additional user feedback on their current prototype we also made some suggested design adaptations. Importantly, our UI audit had revealed some accessibility issues that we adjusted in the design accordingly.

The Result

A redesigned native app prototype with added emphasis on storytelling and simplified navigation. Two new features, Rewards and Impact, to engage users early on and then provide a sense of community purpose as they continue on the app. Every valuable engagement within the app - review posting, sharing with friends etc - goes towards both supporting the ethical businesses themselves and a direct community goal of tree planting.  

Our project’s impact

This was an invaluable experience for our team, not only as our last project at GA, but our first client project as juniors. We couldn’t have asked for more engaged and supportive clients. While the app is still in early development, our project will also have short and medium term impact:

• Our research provided IGC with data and suggestions to improve the usability and accessibility of the beta app.

• Validated their native app concept amongst their target market to further their business case

To be continued…

We received a fantastic response from our client. For this gamification topic, our team’s next steps will focus on testing the usability of the rewards and impact features, gathering further user insights that can provide real value to our client. Watch this space, the In Good Company app will be coming to an app store near you soon…