Client Project: Qrowded — Educational Equity Crowdfunding App
The last project in our UXDI course and it would test our UX abilities. In this project, the clients were real (start ups) and needed real UX solutions for their companies.
Client
Qrowded
Project time
2 weeks and 3 days
Team members
3 (Fiona MacDougall, Nik Gupta and Vincent Fujiwara).
Techniques Used
- Competitor Analysis
- Surveys
- Interviews
- Market Research
- Task Analysis
- Card sorting
- User Journey
- Story board
- Site Map
- Design Studio
- Paper prototype
- Digital/Clickable prototype
- Wire-Frames
- High-fidelity Prototype
- User Testing
- Screen flow
- Kan ban
- Presenting
Part 1: Learning about the client and Challenge
Qrowded is a small startup with a innovative idea of educating potential investors about equity crowdfunding. They understand that this topic has a an good financial return when one is well informed and experienced, but for a novice investor it can be proportionally risky and time consuming since the theme could be dry and overwhelming due to the specific terminology and amount of information available.
Challenge
Qrowded showed us their digital prototype app and requested us to introduce educational and gamification features to form a learning and enjoyable experience for the users. After testing the prototype, we were not able to totally understand it because it did not reflect their main idea of educating their users to equity crowdfunding.
The project requirement was to complete the client’s brief in a 2 week sprint.
Part 2: Process, Sector and User Research
As UX Designers, we used a User-Centred Design process called the Double-diamond process which is divided into four phases:
- Discover — With the use of market and competitive research, survey and interviews we were broadening our scope to understand how the sector works and who are the potential users.
- Define — Once we had enough information about the sector and users, we had to narrow down what are the major pain points of the users. Aligning with the business objectives and focusing on solving the core problem, which would essentially solve most of the issues we found in the discover phase.
- Develop — With the definition of the core problem, we could start brainstorming and explore possible solutions for it. Researching references, prototyping, testing and iterating.
- Deliver — Once the best possible solution filtered out, we had to display it in a formal presentation together with all our findings to in a specification document.
Discover
Initial Market Assessment
Once we learned about Qrowded and understood exactly what they did, we started a research to make a sense of the sector that defined the company. Qrowded fell into a unique group that was an educational platform, with gamification elements and focused in investments (equity-crowdfunding). We were not able to find any direct competitor for Qrowded. All the competitors were only investments platforms, education providers or apps with gamification elements that involved some sort of sales venue or other topic.
The result of this research made us more exited about this project since we believed that it was a great opportunity since Qrowded was the company that is pioneering this kind of service.
User Research
We needed to collect information about the possible market users to know who they were and gain understanding of their needs, interests and what held them from investing in equity crowdfunding.
With a survey, that had the objective of gathering information and screening users who did not have any interest in equity crowdfunding we were able to get valuable information and call in users for an interview and dig deeper into the user’s preferences.
I analysed and crossed the results of the surveys and got to excellent numbers to identify the potential users within investment groups and get the feeling of the real potential of the market Qrowded is focusing on.
More than 80% of the people who replied to our survey were interested or had already invested in equity crowdfunding. Of these 80%, 67% have invested and still want to continue investing.
The only problem of the sector is that 70% of these users would invest more but lack investment knowledge, causing them to hold back.
65% would find articles and expert commentary helpful.
This means that there is still lots of potential in this sector. People that have tried equity crowdfunding have not been scared away. Qrowded doesn’t need to convince people to start investing, they just need to help by educating them; showing the right articles, expert commentaries and explaining the terminology.
Personas
From the results we were able to shape three types of users that represent the people that are interested in learning about Equity Crowdfunding, otherwise known as personas:
- Alison — Knows nothing about equity investments and has never invested before
- Gregory — Knows a bit about financial investments and has previously invested in equity crowdfunding but has been burnt by the experience
- Shaz — Has very good knowledge of finance but is highly risk averse. She’d therefore like to understand the subject more.
Analysing the personas, we can see that all of them have a different educational level regarding equity crowdfunding. But we had to concentrate our efforts to one, without discarding totally the needs of the other two. Gregory was our selected persona, because his needs aligned closer to our business objectives and he would be type of person that would influence other users to invest in equity crowdfunding since he has tried it before.
Gregory is:
- a 32 year old product manager based in London
- His main goal is to increase his knowledge and confidence in financial investments
- His biggest pain-point is that he’s been burned by bad investment decisions due to a lack of sufficient information.
- His motivation for crowdfunding is to help other startups with the initial step.
Interviews
We were able to contact some of the people that replied to our survey that helped us shape Gregory. We called them in for an interview to understand their reaction and learn the tasks they have to complete when learning about equity crowdfunding and selecting a company to invest.
Competitor Analysis
We then took the steps Gregory needs to complete to learn about equity crowdfunding (and his possible investment) and checked to see what were the options offered within Qrowded and their competitors to complete each task.
User Journey Map
The major pain points that Gregory encounters are caused by having to leave the crowdfunding platforms to search for a definition of specific term or blogs that have texts that explain about investments in a way that he understands. Having to leave the platform also to confirm if the information about the company is real frustrates Gregory.
Define
In conclusion of the discovery phase, we were able to summarise the focus of the Development and Deliverance phases:
By providing concise and contextual information through socially interactive case studies, we can empower users to make wiser investment decisions.
Due to our limited time, 2 weeks sprint, we had to prioritise the features that would align with our focus.
Part 3: Design, testing and iterations
Develop
Design Studio
After we had determined what features had the highest priority, we detected a problem that would be best if discussed with our client. For this, a Design Studio session was setup by us and the Qrowded stakeholders were invited to join. The collaboration of the stakeholders during this session was extremely important for both sides, because we, the UX team, wanted to know if their thoughts about the design were aligned with ours and this would also make them feel even closer to our process, by sketching their ideas with us and not only via weekly meetings. This gave the stakeholders more confidence and trust that we would deliver a design closer to what they expected.
Paper Prototype → Testing → Iteration
From the design we got to in the Design Studio session, we had a solid start for the rest of the app. We were able to create the other screens for a paper prototype for rapid testing. Our major concern was to create a flow within the app, so visual design details could be left out in this prototype.
We had good feedback from the users but, the lack of visual details made it difficult for the user to totally understand the flow.
We made a total of 3 tests with the users we called in for interviews that had the same characteristics as Gregory using this paper prototype. This counted as one round.
Wireframes/Digital Prototype → Testing → Iteration
For the the second round, we built wireframes with the iterations from the first round testing and structured it in Invision to have clickable and digital version in a mobile device, where the user could have a closer experience of the final version. We noticed that small details in the visuals of the app would make a great difference to the usability and experience of the user which we thought was only a small detail that users complained in the first iteration.
Gamification
I noticed there was not a clear journey for the user to walk through the app, which is the backbone of any game. The user needs an objective. Creating a path and stimulating the user to get from point A to point B was the main key for the app to work. Up to this round of testing the users would get lost not knowing what was the purpose of the app.
High-fidelity → Testing → Iteration
For our third round testing, we had a High-fidelity mockup with all the features and iterations from the previous rounds for the user to experience how the app would work.
Deliver
You can try out our final prototype on Marvel.
Results
In conclusion, I believe that we were able to steer Qrowded to the correct path their objective of educating people about equity crowdfunding through a gamified app, which was not clear in their original prototype.
This was a two week sprint, which means there are still several changes for Qrowded to have the app function properly, as we noticed from our last round of testing. But the research and tested design changes proposed within these two weeks by Fiona, Nik and myself, have given Qrowded a direction to follow.
We suggested future steps that could be added as features to enhance the gamification of the app and make it even more entertaining, for example;
- badges,
- a point system
- leveling up,
- Selection of difficulty
Thanks for reading.
