campaign matching platform for a social entrepreneur
Launchpilots is a social entrepreneur that helps connect brands & agencies to partner with targeted student communities to mobilize social engagements and user activations, in exchange for sponsorship of their projects and events. What they expected from Heathwallace team was to assist them to form their web design strategy based on business objectives and target users’ real needs.
Before the project kicked off, our team had a couple of discussions with Launchpilots’ stakeholders to define the scope of our project. Due to the issue of time restriction, we agreed to focus on researching and uncovering the existing and potential usability issues. Based on the understanding of those issues, Heathwallace team would suggest a practical solution and guidance on prospective refining approaches.
The first phase of our design processes includes heuristic review, stakeholder interview, user interview & questionnaire, persona, and user journey map. The findings from the first phase are reflected in our second phase, in which information architecture, wireframe, and visual templates were included. The third phase is evaluation, which means bringing our designs into testing and improving them in the Iteration phase. There should be a few rounds of evaluation and iteration before launching the website.
RESEARCH PHASE
Heuristic Review
To identify existing usability problems in Launchpilots previous user interfaces, our team conducted a heuristic review. We collected all the web pages and divided them into two journeys: the brand's journey and the student community leader's journey. By walking through the screens, our key findings were mostly around aspects of user control, simplicity, flexibility, and user support. Among them, here are the main issues that we found:
• No clear entry point for brand users
• Too many Manual processes got involved which would reduced efficiency
• Form design usability Issue
User Interview & SURVEY
We identified there are two types of users: brand marketing officers and student community leaders. For brand users, we conducted interviews to Gain insight into how brands look to advertise their company and learn about their triggers, business objectives, and additional draws to a website. For student users, with Launchpilots' help, we send out questionnaires to understand the common features that users believe should be incorporated, as well as identify the frustration they encounter when using this service.
Stakeholder interview
The main purpose of having stakeholder meetings was to understand their business logic and requirements. Using this as a foundation, we aim at helping them to define their needs. From our initial meeting with LaunchPilots, we learned that there are 3 key metrics for determining success that they would like to improve through this project:
• Increased number of active campaigns
• Increased number of student applications to sponsors
• Increased approval rates
Persona & User Journey
Based on our previous findings and understandings, we crafted two personas, one for brand users and one for students. Meanwhile, a crafted user journey has also been identified for these two personas. By listing the users’ tasks and behaviors needed to accomplish their goals and evaluating their feelings along the journey, it helped us to identify and focus on trouble spots, low points, and high points of the consumer experience.
