UX for A Social Platform: How to Encourage Positive Consumer Action
Snapshot
The Challenge
A start-up company has a web application — designed to enable consumers to make sustainable choices through a values-driven marketplace. The web app provides information around corporate community investment. However, the company struggled to engage users with its web app and low numbers of returned users. This repercussion has impacted the conversion rates.
My Process and Role
I collaborated with three other designers in a 2.5-week Design Sprint to solve this challenge. We applied the Design Thinking method– started by gaining deep insights into the business and problem, understand the people we are designing for, and analysed sustainability and CSR of resources companies and banks.
Management & Coordination
I led the project and involved in every step of the design sprint process with an emphasis on collaboration. I assigned tasks to my team, planned according to the Design Thinking process. We spent the first 1.5 weeks on the discovery and define phases, and focused on the design and delivery in the last week. I used Trello and physical kanban board to manage and keep track of all tasks.
Customer Insights & Ideation
I collaborated with another UX Designer, UI Designer and a UX Researcher to discover insights and translate ideas into features to address customer pain-points, behaviour and motivations.
Design & Validation
I executed user journeys, built prototypes and conducted usability testing.
I took the mid-fidelity wireframes to the next level in Figma and fine-tuned all the details, such as colours, images, fonts, and icons.
The Solution
- We redesigned the user experience by simplifying the onboarding process and make it relatable or have a connection to the users, therefore users feel that their contribution matter.
- We redefined the target users to uncover more opportunities.
- We also removed the barrier to making change by providing clear– actionable steps on how simple it can be to encourage action.
The Outcome
Users feel that the change is actionable and relatable to their personal goals. Users like being able to see the impacts of their changes before selecting the provider.
Learn more about my detail process, please keep reading 😊
The Company
This privately-owned company provides corporate social responsibility (CSR) information to consumers about their current service providers– such as utilities, banks, telcos, by supplying them with a personal ‘social responsibility score.
The digital platform provides information around corporate community investment, designed to enable consumers to make sustainable choices through the scores of alternative service providers and use these scores to switch providers. By making the change to a more socially responsible provider, users can improve their social responsibility score.
The Approach
Discovery
After the kickoff meeting with the client, we created the research plan and made a few assumptions based on our experience of the website.
Our early assumptions were:
- Users don’t feel any connection to the company
- Users need meaningful information to engage before on-boarding
- Users don’t understand the scoring system and don’t know what to do with it.
- Users don’t feel like they have learnt anything about corporate social responsibility.
- The website does not provide a clear call to action for users to change providers
Who are the competitors?
We looked at other companies who had a similar mission to our client and compiled a feature comparison table to see what their platforms were offering to their users. This helped us to understand what the market was currently offering.
Learning about Sustainability
We want to know what motivate people to become interested in sustainability. We researched online– social media– Facebook, sustainability forums and websites, Reddit; and we learnt that:
And we also found although there is a demand for ethical consumerism, a recent study shows that people who say they would prefer to purchase ethically, only 3% actually do.
Theory suggests that to overcome this intention-behaviour gap, we should seek to understand the consumers internal planning process. Providing them with clear, easy steps will improve the likelihood of them choosing to make an ethical purchase.
User Insights
We conducted user research: contextual inquiry and interviews to dig deeper into users problems and pain points.
Contextual Inquiry
We conducted contextual inquiries with 8 users, observed how they respond and interact with the current SFI website.
We asked them to explore the website and thinking out loud in their own narratives. We observed their impressions around the messaging, assigned them a task to complete the onboarding and receive their SFI scores.
We were able to validate our assumptions — the key themes were:
What do I do with this score?
Are they sponsored?
User Interviews
The client informed us about their target users during the kickoff meeting, they are:
- Millennials (age 23–38)
- Gen Z (age 18–22)
- Socially conscious
Our user research goal was to identify user’s motivations and attitudes towards choosing their service providers, social responsibility and understand their pain points around making sustainable consumption choices.
We conducted 16 interviews to empathise with the users, distributed a survey to validate the theme we found in the contextual inquiry, and we received 47 responses. What we learnt were:
Millennials and Gen Z are motivated to be socially conscious because of their fear for the world’s future.
54% of young adults– age 18–25 had their bank providers chosen by their parents.
People want to feel like they are making a difference in the environment and sustainability through their actions.
People feel there is a lack of reliable sources and transparency to find corporate social responsibility information
People feel powerless towards making a change through their consumer behaviour.
People think that changing banks is too difficult, despite not liking their providers CSR.
“My parent signed me up for the dollar month at Commbank. So I didn’t know any better.”
People become concerned with social responsibility issues after seeing the effects of climate change and severe weather patterns; on the news or personal experience.
Although people said their main barrier to changing bank provider is because it seems ‘too difficult,’ however the majority of people who had gone through changing bank provider said it was an easy or neutral experience.
Defining a new target audience
We wanted to learn further about why people were motivated to be sustainable consumers and what motivates them to take action, without the biases which could happen during user interviews. We joined the Australian sustainable living forums on Facebook to observe and understand the needs/motivations behind socially activated consumers.
In the Facebook group, there was a post:
What happened in your life to make you want to be more sustainable?
The responses to this question showed that one of the main motivations towards becoming a more socially conscious consumer was becoming a parent.
We learned from our earlier user research that family played a significant role in choosing bank providers for their children. This new pattern indicated to us that there is something more in a family role relating to socially conscious behaviours.
We sent out the second survey to validate this pattern, aimed at family-oriented and parents. This group of people could be our potential target audience because they have been influencing young adults’ banking decision.
We received 30 responses overnight and the key insights from these data were:
- 94% said that thinking of future generations has made them more conscious about social responsibility
- 84% of respondents were prepared to pay more for socially responsible products
Empathise with New Target Users
Based on our research, we concluded that our target users are motivated by lifestyle factors and family, rather than by generations.
We developed two key ‘socially activated’ mindsets:
- Family-oriented, who make conscious efforts for the children or future generations by buying from socially responsible brands.
- Single, younger, who take small steps– such as recycling, catch public transport, etc, to contribute to sustainability for the future of the planet.
We created the empathy map for each mindset to learn what they are experiencing in the contexts, to understand whom we were designing for, and to keep our team’s alignment on the user prioritisation.
“There’s no planet B.”
The family mindset has more money to give back, however, often their financial decisions tend to be influenced by interest rates and fees.
“I’m conscious, but my actions don’t always reflect that.”
The single/ younger mindset is more socially conscious, but not necessarily they do what they said.
Journey Map
We created a user journey map for the onboarding process to:
- understand users’ mindsets when going through every stage towards making changes– how do they feel, think.
- The visualisation also enabled us to turn their pain points into opportunities and recommendations.
Reframing the Problem
At this point, we were able to draw the right problem to solve; that is:
Users need clear, valuable and actionable information to make socially responsible decisions; so they can choose providers that are aligned with their values.
Designing Solution
We used How Might We (HMW) method to reframe the problem to begin the solution process:
- How Might We inspire users to feel empowered that their action can make the difference?
- How Might We show what their change would do to help visualise the impact?
- How Might We simplify the onboarding process and information so they can confidently choose a new provider?
- How Might We show the process of changing providers to be easy?
Design Studio
With the remaining timeframe and collaborative nature of ideas generation, we chose the design studio method to ideate.
I facilitated a 45-minutes design studio with my team and one external person to join us for fresh perspectives.
During the session, it is required to time-box every activity. We diverged and converged to sketch as many solutions as possible, share, explore, discuss and prioritise what most important for the users.
Feature Prioritisation
During the design studio, we came up with many great ideas. We implemented the Impact vs Effort method for features prioritisation.
This method allowed us to see the feasibility of each idea. It presented to us that although feature like ‘community map’ to inform companies initiatives in your local area would be a high impact for our user, but the development and data required for this feature would be a high effort and unrealistic timeframe.
Focus on the Purpose
We encountered a problem to execute our ideas into wireframes because the proposed solutions didn’t feel connected to the users' values and motivations we defined in the earlier stages. After an open and honest discussion among the team, we decided to take a couple of steps back and re-centre our focus to the root of the problem and redefine the user flow.
We went back to the problem statement and empathy maps of both mindsets: the Family-oriented and the Single– Younger. In the problem statement: “… users choose providers that are aligned with their values”. The value is the key to make them feel connected and motivated to make the difference. Then we looked deeper into the relation of value and user needs. It turned out that the value in the context to make a difference is not the practical values: products + features + services and so on. But the values in this context is emotive. Things they care about were environment, animal welfare, equality, human rights, giving back to community, company that treats their employees well.
Proposed user flow
We needed to keep the process for our users simple and intuitive, with an emphasis on how easy it is to choose a new provider and make the change, with actionable information. By removing the scoring system and simplifying the number of steps required to see actionable information, we were able to create a refined user flow.
Prototype
Testing Early and Quickly
We prototyped with paper first to test our solutions quickly, before spending time in building wireframe in Figma.
We built the onboarding prototype, selecting a provider category– started with banks and then presented a set of raw data screen showing how much each provider has spent towards the cause in the past financial year.
Our usability testing objectives were:
- Gauge users’ understanding of the presented data.
- Find out if the users were motivated to change provider after seeing the data.
The key insights from user feedback were:
- The simple onboarding was enjoyable
- They liked being able to see the raw data, however, the data presentation confused our users. It didn’t encourage users to make the switch.
- Users need meaningful information than just the numbers, such as put context into these numbers/ data.
Testing Mid-fi Prototype
We continued testing the mid-fi prototype with 5 users and the key insights were:
- They like being able to see the percentage increase and decrease in spending from each provider.
- They would like to see the impact their change would make before selecting the provider.
- Users like to see the initiatives from the banks, however, these initiatives need to relate to the displayed data.
The Outcome– MVP
Our MVP solution was not about comparing values — interest rate/ cost/ fee/ friend’s referral deals like other comparisons websites are currently offering. The solutions to improve the user experience of this platform were to
- simplify the onboarding process,
- focusing on relieving the users’ pain points through actionable information,
- and forming a connection through positive language and personalisation.
How did the improved user experience look like
The improved user experience of the website from the user journey POV are as follow–
view the mid-fidelity prototype
Discovery Stage
- Using relatable and welcoming language throughout the site, to promote optimistic feeling for users.
- Previously, the website had a high rate of users dropping off at the onboarding process. We eliminated the lengthy onboarding, and focused on a simple and unintrusive one-screen onboarding, to make the change on one service category at a time. Simplifying this process aims to keep users on the website, and interested in changing providers.
Learning Stage
- We replaced the scoring system with clear, transparent information about each company — which is able to be filtered by the cause that the user personally cares about. This empowers the user to make their own decision based on their personal values.
- Users told us that they want to see the impact they were making. When a user decides to ‘Learn More’ they can see the main causes that they will be directly supporting by changing to that provider.
Conversion Stage
- After the comparison page, we want to keep engaging users and not to lose them. So we need to speak to one of the main pain points– changing providers was too much effort by providing clear, actionable steps to making change and to encourage action
- Give users the opportunity to share their impact with friends not only makes the user feel good about their change decision but encourage their social networks to do the same using the social proof mental model and to drive more ‘socially activated’ users to the website.
Product Roadmap
From our design studio session, there were some ideas worth testing:
- Publish user-generated content from a credible source.
- Publish ‘in-the-field’ stories and ‘get involved’ campaigns.
- Community map, search by postcode to find localised projects.
- Create a forum where users can post recommendations for topics they care about.
My Learning
One of my responsibilities is to ensure we met the project requirements and expectation within a tight timeframe– 2 weeks and keep everyone in the team on the same page was important and challenging at the same time.
I learnt by having honest communication with the team, listening to others with empathy and letting go of personal opinions had helped immensely to complete this project in time.
Client’s feedback
We presented the solutions to the client and he responded positively to our recommendations. Paraphrasing one of his feedback– being aware that social change is a long term game, we need to be mindful around quantifying company’s initiatives.
Kudos:
To my team: Chanelle Nasser, Melissa Lau, Alex Power
