"Play is the Highest Form of Research" - Albert Einstein
Sev Saffen
Creative Problem Solver
YOYO Herbal Extracts
In Jelly Bean form
Overview
Yoyo is a personalized herbal supplement company based in New York. I have collaborated with two founders over a 4 weeks period as a UX designer. We had twice a week virtual communication meetings on zoom, as well as messaging through slack and email in between for check-ins.
Yoyo’s goal is to bring Traditional Chinese Medicine to western countries and create access for users to personalized jelly bean shaped herbal extract supplements. During our work collaboration our main priority was to understand and learn from our user’s customer journey to improve conversion rates and the on-boarding processes.
The Problem
Yoyo is currently running Ads on social media platforms, such as facebook and instagram. Our goal was to optimize the acquisition and conversion of the ads performance and its value delivery to the users as well as discover unmet needs or wants the users have during their customer journey with their product.
How potential clients read to the ads.
What do they do on the landing page
Do they take the quiz
What happens after the quiz
The Solution
In order to learn directly from the users we have decided upon to create User Study Sessions. The user study I have created and facilitated with five users had two main components to it:
User Interviews
Usability testing
My Role:
As a user experience/product designer working with Yoyo I have worn many hats during this agile process of collaboration. Here is a list of other tasks, deliverables and responsibilities I held during my time working with yoyo supplements:
Competitive & Industry Research
User studies; prepare the user interviews + facilitate with five users
Affinity Map
Synthesize the user studies; user interviews + usability testing
Create User persona
Present the findings to the stakeholders, propose new solutions intangine with the user study findings
Redesign and deliver results
Wireframe of new Landing page design
Design Process
Discover & Empathize
Competitive & Industry Research
Before going into the primary research with user interviews and usability testing, I decided to do a competitive analysis and market research on the competitors and their product positioning in the marketplace. My goal was to familiarize myself with the wellness and supplement industry and its current offering to the users. I also researched about eastern and alternative medicine space to familiarize myself further with the product offering.
Heuristic Analysis
I conducted a Heuristic Analysis by Jacob Nielsen, on the current landing page and the quiz that follows up for personalization of the product the company offers. The goal of the heuristic analysis was to assess the functionality and the current design. I took notes on these and wanted to compare my pre-assessment data to the User study findings in order to make the final design decisions based on data.
I also took the Personalized quiz myself thoroughly couple of times to assess it’s user experience including the user journey, content and user flow, clarity and it’s design.
Dig through the past user research and documents
I had access to a shared Google drive folder with the company, I went thoroughly in their drive to learn more about the company and inform myself about their product, past research, branding and analytics data to get to know the company's goal and mission better.
Primary Research
User studies included user interviews and usability testing weaved in together. They were deliberately designed in sections to discover user behavior, opinions, current user experience, feelings, mental models, their aspirations and belief systems.
I interviewed five users in total, one in person and four remotely through zoom with screen sharing. Below are the sections from the user study.
Section 1: Questions for getting to know the users
Section 2: Usability Testing
Section 3: Quiz product reaction questions
Section 4: Closing the Interview
Define
Synthesis & Analyze
Because of the four-week time constraint of this project,I created a priority list of issues such as Critical, Major and Minor which exactly corresponds to the synthesized main problem finding’s accordingly. I hoped to provide valuable, high impact design solutions to those most pressing and critical problems for the end users within the four week timeframe of my collaboration.
Affinity Map
Affinity Mapping was helpful to discover the common themes after the user studies such as; pain points, the needs and wants the user’s are looking for in the wellness and supplement space.
Usability Testing results were very insightful in terms of showing us what the problems were with the current ads, quiz and the landing page design.
Example of the most critical findings from user studies
Analyzed Findings
Here are the discovered three most critical problems with the current user experience taken from user study findings.
Persona board
Persona
Based on my findings, I created a user persona that aligns with the company’s value proposition and the target market. Keeping this persona in mind throughout the design process also helped me practice user centered design.
Ideate & Design
Presentation title page
Present findings to the client
Upon completing the research and defining the findings phase, it was time to share my findings with the founders. I gave a presentation of my findings virtually with the breakdown of the priority list from critical to minor problems to tackle on the user journey interaction that’s supported by the user study sessions.
My design strategy approach was driven by the relationship between users, product, marketing and business objectives. Example below.
From user's perspective
What is the product?
What is the benefit of the product for me?
How does it work?
From business perspective
Who is it for?
What’s it for?
What change am I seeking to make?
Prototype & Deliverables
Advertisement on social media before re-design
Newly designed ads
Once I got feedback from the stakeholders upon the presentation of the user research findings I started to brainstorm to generate new ideas for potential solutions with the synthesized user findings in mind and started to design a new ad. Experience.
Scroll down to see the newly designed and proposed solutions.
Designed solution -1
Issue 1 Critical
Summary
Users don't understand what the product is looking at the old advertisement
Recommendation
Communicate what the product is, in a direct way where users can tell what they are seeing by a quick glance
Designed solution -2
Issue 2 Critical
Summary
What is the benefit for the user aka value proposition of this product?
Recommendation
Show what the benefit of the product is for users in a relatable way.
Designed solution -3
Issue 3 Critical
Summary
Users don’t have any motivation as to why they should take
the quiz.
Recommendation
Create an association in the user's mind between the necessity of taking the quiz then receiving personalized herbal recommendations as a coupled solution.
Landing page before re-design
Newly designed landing page wireframe
Because of the four-week time constraint of this project and upon delivering the solutions for the new ads previously, I immediately dove into re-designing a wireframe for the current landing page according to the user research findings.
Scroll down to see the newly designed and proposed solution.
Final Thoughts
What I learned
This was a great opportunity for me to practice agile working methods while balancing the strict timelines, user needs and business objectives while collaborating in quick time arounds. I had a lot of autonomy to design and execute the user studies to solve a couple of big issues all at once, because of the short project timeline. If I had more time, I would have run two different usability testing sessions, one for the ad. experience and another one for the landing page and the quiz. I would also focus on creating a user journey map as it feels to me that might have been more relevant and insightful for the founders and the business to better understand the user’s interaction with the product because of the breadcrumbing methodology they are using currently.
User studies were very valuable in terms of showing us what the unmet user needs and wants were from the current experience and how to solve them accordingly. I very much enjoyed my collaboration with the stakeholders and received great feedback on the quality and thoughtfulness of my work.