​Growing Retention for a Donation Startup
Emotion as a core value
One of Ribon’s greatest challenges was to bring out the right emotions at the right time in the app’s donation experience. During a one week design sprint, we reviewed the app’s features, found the most painful spots in it’s experience, created hypotheses and built prototypes for possible solutions.
Research time
To validate our hypotheses, I went back to the qualitative data from previous researches and user interviews. I did a desk research as well to get information about how positive emotions manifest in the human brain and how that knowledge could be used to create good experience design.
Team workshop
I really like to get the team involved in the creative process too, so I invited relevant people to a design workshop. There we discussed about the hypotheses, searched together for references of existing solutions and brainstormed about possible solutions.
First alternatives and testing
Since we didn’t test the design sprint’s prototype with Ribon’s users, I adjusted it to fit the real experience and showed it to them to understand what their first impressions would be.
They told us the experience was bland, unappealing! We understood it didn’t have elements that told the users that they were doing something to be celebrated, that they should be happy about it.
Adjusting and retesting
I tweaked the experience to be more interactive, more visually appealing and personal to the users. Then we did new a round of usability tests with the users.
The new prototype got us a much better response! The users were able to better understand the donation process and were excited to see the new visuals added to their experience. We learned that the animations had to be refined as well as the copywriting and the user flow was dragging a bit.
The third time is a charm
The following alternatives had a shorter user flow, clearer copywriting and more refined and interactive animations. We decided to add social components to bring out the feeling of community and togetherness.
After a third round of testing, we found the users were really excited for the new donation flow. The new animations helped them understand the growing impact of their donations, got them cheerful for what they were doing and made them feel more grateful and insightful after the experience.
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