Researcher
Sampling Platform Redesign
Influenster
Influenster was founded in 2010 as a hybrid product sampling, review and market research platform. Users visit mainly in hopes of being selected for high-value samples in VoxBoxes. Influenster currently has over 7 million product reviewers. Current limitations include: a homogenous user base of millennial women, low user retention, extraneous features, and limited number of VoxBoxes, which are the main draw to the platform.
Timeline
January 2021 - March 2021
Software
Adobe XD, Miro, Adobe Illustrator, Trello
Role
The majority of my role was to conduct primary and secondary research to get an in-depth understanding of the user base, the competition, and the current and future value proposition. I created personas, user stories, facilitated workshops, ideated solutions, and collaborated on presentations for stakeholders and marketing. I also contributed to the design team's wireframes and prototypes.
Team
Joshua Fryszer (Research), Mariana Ciocca (Research), Paul Harrop (Product Manager), Brodie Rich (Designer), Mehreen Z (Designer)
The Vision
“Over the next 3 to 5 years, our vision is to become the largest product sampling community in the world.” Although they had initially stated this broad vision, stakeholders had conflicting priorities and not everyone agreed to the vision. Their team had varying amounts of interest in expanding its social features, growing into new segments, and pivoting into product discovery.
The Initial Ask
Reimagine the Influenster sampling and review platform in order to expand the community exponentially over the next several years.
Goal
We sought to deliver on their initial ask, but first needed to break it down into meaningful steps while also taking on the task of creating alignment between the varied stakeholder opinions.
Status
Project is in progress.
Breaking down the ask
The project started out with a large scope and broad initial ask so the first steps were to narrow in on insights that the design team could take action on.
In order to do so, we broke down a broad ask into meaningful steps in order to refine the vision and create personas to design for. The steps broke down into: vision definition, user journey mapping, and MVP definition.
Vision Definition
User Journey Mapping
MVP Definition
Discovery and immersion into the Influenster ecosystem and CX to understand the opportunities and pain points.
Identify and prioritize personas. Map their journey across the experience and identify key moments to design for.
Prioritize and define the minimum viable product required to deliver user value based on the findings in phases 1-2.
01 VISION DEFINITION
User Research
One of the first things we did to in order to clarify their initial ask was to understand where Influenster is at currently, including their pain points and opportunities.
We started by immersing ourselves into existing data and user research, including user surveys and usage data. To augment this existing data, we gathered user info through additional secondary research (app store reviews and Reddit discussions). We also conducted a competitive audit and product audit. Finally, to understand the perspective of the business, we conducted several stakeholder surveys across Influenster functional areas
All this data was brought together by coding and analyzing on the Dovetail app to uncover insights. Some of the main takeaways from the research were:
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There is a very high churn rate for new users, and a high learning curve for the platform.
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Almost everyone is there for Voxboxes, but it’s unclear how to get one and there’s not enough to go around.
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Users were frustrated by feeling like they give more than they get, and often don’t get samples or have clarity on how to get a sample.
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Stakeholders had conflicting interests around whether they wanted to add social media features or not.
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Stakeholder interest in expanding into product discovery - which users also showed some interest in.
We honed in on some opportunity areas and identified 3 priority areas to ideate around:
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Individualism... promote authentic, individual expression and celebrate member’s unique identity in order to combat the homogeneity of the current user base as well as promote authentic reviews.
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Reciprocity... reimagining the existing relationship between user and Influenster, and expanding the value proposition of the platform to new forms of recognition and reward.
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Guidance... guide users to product discovery with more expertise. Currently, users do not see content relevant to them and it offers a confusing experience.
01 VISION DEFINITION
Vision Definition
Next, we captured everyone’s ideas around the 3 areas and distilled it down into the highest priority items to solve for. We held an ideation workshop with Beyond and Influenster to generate a wide array of ideas and opportunities.
After the workshop, we mapped the ideas out onto a customer journey (fitting it under acquisition, activation, consumption, creation, re-engament, and referral), grouped them into categories and prioritized them according to urgency and feasibility.
The prioritized categories were honed down to: reimagine onboarding, guiding users on their path to sample eligibility, improving their profile, and rethink review writing flow.
Many staff suggested a redesign of the homepage, however, we moved that down to "priority 2" due to the fact that many other considerations from priority 1 needed to be solidified before we could make decisions on the homepage.
Although we had initially identified product discovery as a priority, items like "Browsing UX" were moved further downstream, to "priority 3." We decided that we must focus on getting the fundamentals right first, which earns us the right to go into discovery.
We held a meeting to get stakeholder alignment around the priorities before creating our personas.
02 PERSONA | USER JOURNEY
Building Personas
Unlike many clients, Influenster arrived with a lot research about their current users. What they needed help with was focusing and empathizing with those users. So, we identified personas who we were going to design for. They are a combination of current users as well as people we would like to reach. We honed in on the “onboarding sample seeker” (to help tackle the onboarding experience and the initial learning curve, and churn) “existing sample seeker” (to tackle existing pains with sampling, and think of other ways to bring delight, as well as move them towards reviewing) and “existing community contributor” (the ideal persona, there is a small subset we want to grow). An example of this is Jasmine, our married mother of 2 young children who would likely be short on time and would want to understand what samples INFL offers her before she commits time to onboarding. The next step we’re working on is to validate these personas.
02 PERSONA | USER JOURNEY
User surveys to validate assumptions
In order to help us validate or invalidate our assumptions and finalize our personas and user journeys, we created a list of research questions that still needed answering. We used the RICE method to prioritize the questions, then built out user surveys for each of our personas.
Some of the insights we were looking for through our survey included:
What data needs to be collected during onboarding and what can be collected post-onboarding?
When do users prefer to fill our surveys on mobile vs desktop? Why?
What type of relationships do users currently have with the brands, and what relationship do the brands (and users) want to have?
02 PERSONA | USER JOURNEY
Mapping out user journeys
The detailed needs, pains, and gains across each persona’s journey was mapped out, both from the customer and business’s side. This was the primary tool for alignment between Influenster and Beyond on the exact “problem space” that we will be working in.
03 MVP DEFINITION
UX Flows
Finally, this stage is still in the works but we are moving into UX flows which will eventually inform our MVP.
We are actively putting ourselves in the shoes of the user by using INFL and going through the onboarding, sampling, review processes and screen capturing them to help inform the UX flows
04 - 06 Future Steps
Upcoming Phases
These are the upcoming steps - we do still need final alignment on the user journey and MVP, but it is looking strong and the stakeholders have been positive and overall in alignment with our direction.
In future months, the rest of the team will design, test, and launch the product into the world.
Vision Definition
User Journey Mapping
MVP Definition
Scope and Design
Build and Test
GTM Launch
