World Revolution App by Adbusters
At RED-Academy I was assigned to work with our client Adbusters. The client has a strong presence in the North American market for a political art magazine. In the magazine market, they positioned themselves in unique and unusual approach. Their manifesto is about anti-big commercials like most companies do.
Some examples we notice each of their magazines don’t have a consistent Adbusters logo and they don’t do consistent layout grid and more free-flow approach for most of the content.
At first glance, we believed this was going to be an interesting project because it’s a totally different approach from what we learned. When we studied UX and UI we like to talk about being organized, using a proper grid system. We thought it is going to be challenging to find the right balance between the free-flow approach and structured approaches.
From the app perspective, they were thinking to build a platform (mobile app) where they can provide two-way communications to their current subscribers about the campaign they organized because from time to time Adbusters is actively arranging the campaigns. Most of their campaigns are related to social issues, and they didn’t have a specialized platform to share their campaigns, they only relied on email subscribers they collected, and email them when new campaigns begin. They want this app to be a separate entity from Adbusters and wanted to name the app as “World Revolution”.
App Idea
When we just started our project we believe pushed notification is more useful compared to email in terms of reminding people to keep updated with campaigns they subscribed to.
From that hypothesis, our idea for the mobile app is a place where people can subscribe to the campaigns they are interested in, and add to their calendar about the event detail so they can get push notifications whenever a new update comes in.
Research
To test our hypothesis either is right or wrong we decided to do surveys. In our survey, we wanted to know how people keep updated with the current events and trends. More importantly how people use push notification. Do they find it useful or useless? And for existing Adbusters subscribers we also want to know what do they like about Adbusters. Do they actively join their campaigns? Did Adbusters communicate their campaigns effectively to their audiences? Those kinds of questions will help us include relevant features for the app.
Here are some of our findings:
Some quotes from the survey regarding what people think of push notifications.
“I tend to sync more from Facebook events. So it’s be good to have both options. Push notifications feel more effective.”
“I typically find push notifications to be spammy and turn them off, with rare exceptions. I prefer that if you do send push notification make them meaningful and relevant.”
Based on these quotes people find push notification as long as it doesn’t look spammy and show the most important and relevant information to their phones.
From all the survey answers we put them into sticky notes and create an affinity diagram by grouping each answer into different categories.
This method helps us to create a persona and prioritized features on the app.
After we analyzed our findings we came up with a persona to summarize what kind of personality our target audiences are.
Here’s the storyboard of how roughly people are going to use our app.
After we already know what sort of scenario we listed potential features. We categorized them into 3 different categories:
Must-Have: push notification, search bar, homepage, continue as a guest, settings, notification Tab.
Nice to Have: calendar view, campaign subscription, profile account, calendar view, sign-in, sign-up, campaign videos, comments, list-view, filter, my campaign
Nice to Have: upload image for the campaign
Based on our initial conversation with Adbusters representative, they are very reluctant about collecting user data. The only data that they collect are emails from the subscribers. The reason because they don’t want to be labeled as data collectors as big companies do and their whole manifesto is about freedom and against big corporates. On the other hand, to be able to create user interaction like commenting on the events, user profile, my campaigns we need to collect user information to avoid spammers.
After expressing our concern we were able to convince our client to take minimum data from the users such as username, password, and email for the signup. Users can only subscribe to the campaign and commenting on the event if they are already logged in.
For 3 weeks project, we fill that we need to set the boundary and eliminated some of the features that we think not that important like calendar view changed to calendar sync to the native calendar app. After some considerations, here are the list of features as part of our minimum viable product:
MVP: push notification, search bar, homepage, continue as a guest, settings, notification tab, sign in, sign up, event page, campaign page, subscribe campaign, add to calendar
Design
After we settled with MVP features, the next step is to create a low-fidelity app prototype (paper prototype). It took us a couple of iterations before settling with one prototype.
To confirm our design solution was good or not we conducted our test planning by creating some user scenarios for testers to complete. The purpose of this test is to assess if the app workflow makes sense for users or not.
During the testing, we also made sure for each tester to feel comfortable and talk out loud if the user feels uncomfortable or confused during the testing, and let them know the purpose of this test is not for user competency but is to determine if the app is usable or not. The idea is the more transparent and honest the testers be, the better the test result.
Some of the key findings during the test are:
- Changed the term from “Follow” to “Subscribe” on the campaign page
- Subscribe button only on the campaign page
- Simplify the layout from tabs to linear, to show events belonging to a campaign
- “Add to Calendar” button on the event page
We also did the testing for the next mid-fidelity and high-fidelity prototypes to confirm our end product workflow makes sense for the users.
When we already in high-fidelity, we were not only talking about workflow but we also talked about the style. We looked at some of Adbusters magazine trying to understand their language of design. In the end, we came up with a rough hand-drawn design. Like icons headline text we create them from scratch using hand drawing before digitized them using Illustrator and Photoshop.
The picture below is our process from low-fi to hi-fi prototype.
Some of our hi-fidelity screens
Future Considerations
After we did the whole process and got some feedback from clients and different people, here are our potential features that can be added in the future.
- Filter on-going events and finished events
- Add user profile to make it more personalized
- Share campaign and event content on different platforms (eg: Facebook, Instagram, Whatsapp, Email)
That’s it. Thank you for reading this case study.
