Overview
The company, The Green Book Project, has gotten countless feedback regarding the use of their product. Users are wondering why they haven’t seen other reviews in their area and if there are any on the app. Thanks to these users’ curious behavior we built a feature that allows them to see the latest reviews from other users. The Review Newsfeed was born.
MY ROLE
UX Designer
(End-to-End Design,
User Interviews,
Research)
MY TOOLS
Miro (Affinity Map),
SendGrid (Interview Recruitment),
Zoom (Remote Interviews),
Figma (Design)
THE TEAM
Project Manager,
Software Developer,
and UX Designer
THE TIMELINE
April '22 - June '22
What's The Green Book Project?
The Green Book Project is a crowd-sourced review app that helps users from marginalized groups (BIPOC, LGBTQ+, folks with cognitive and physical disabilities, etc) find welcoming and inclusive businesses. Think Yelp but with an inclusive lens! Its primary focus is helping folks from these communities (and allies!) discover establishments to frequent and/or avoid.
Problem at Hand
Users were experiencing a feeling of loneliness while using the mobile application 💔. While The Green Book Project folks were interviewing users to understand their experience with the product, they started to learn of a common theme amongst the majority. Users were not able to access the community that shared the app.
🤔 “I noticed I couldn’t find other reviews in the area...” 🤔
💭 “How can I find other users near me?” 💭
😳 “Are there other users using this application?” 😳
While growth was inevitable for the company, the team could not shake the feeling of loneliness that the users were sharing with the research team- they knew they had to do something!
Plan of Action
The road to creating the Review Newsfeed included the 💎 Double Diamond 💎 design process. This process involves 4 major stages- Discover, Define, Develop, and Deliver.
Discover:
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(Image courtesy of Canva)
During this time, I had to dig deeper to get a better understanding of the problem. This was done through user interviews and user testing, lead by a colleague and myself.
We gathered copious amounts of qualitative data from the users. Information was shared between the team and synthesized for others to digest more easily.
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(Image courtesy of Canva)
Define:
With the information gathered an affinity diagram was created for the team. This allowed everyone to take a look at the information in similar clusters. Members outside of the Product team were also asked to join in on the process to get a better understanding of the project.
This allowed for us to properly define the problem and hone in on a focus.
Develop:
It was finally time to turn all this information into a design solution. While there may be more than one way to tackle this problem, it was not always feasible with stakeholder and developer constrains. Ultimately we compromised with something that created social proof for the users, the Review Newsfeed. We figured allowing users to see reviews written by other people in real time they will be delighted to read other's experiences and be influenced to share their experiences as well. Soon enough wireframes, prototypes, and mockups were created to reflect a Minimum Viable Product.
(Image courtesy of Canva)
My role was particularly important to ensure all sides of the product were accounted for. I wanted to be doubly sure that stake holders, engineers, and users were all considered.
Deliver:
This screen was a huge inspiration for the Review Newsfeed.
I wanted to keep the user's cognitive load at a minimum. I understood that this will be a new feature for the users to explore. Because anything new could be daunting I wanted to be sure they were properly equipped to absorb the new screen and all its new information.
With this in mind, I wanted to essentially show the users a glimpse of a review from a business profile.
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Because the previous designer has already laid out important info for users to know in these business reviews, I thought it was only right to continue to build on this existing model.
Repeating this information onto a new screen meant users will have a basic understanding of the Review Newsfeed. In turn this means additional trust and increased ease of use for the users.
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After rounds of testing and iterations the following is what we landed with!
The Results Show:
Because of the Review Newsfeed feature, The Green Book Project was able to increase quite a few of its product metrics. They noticed an upwards trend in their overall engagement. The Green Book Project saw an increase in the number of reviews, user likes, and push tokens.
What did I learn from this?
Collaborating with your development team early and often was key! Frequent and effective communication allowed for coding and design constants to be dealt with quickly and efficiently.
While pushing out the product is important, you should expect to revise the design more than once if you have to. Iterations are a part of the process. Revisions allow you and the team to get that much closer to achieving the most optimal user-friendly product!
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