Sprint 6: Wrapping up Spring

Intro

We are heading into the final stretch for our first half of our client project with numo. We are preparing for our final presentation to our clients, faculty, and classmates. In addition, we are also creating a website as well as a reframing report. Simultaneously we have been working on narrowing down and refining our solutions, as well as creating the remaining personas that have informed these solutions. It has been stressful but we are incredibly excited to show you the fruits of our labor.

Merchant Personas

In addition to our customer personas we outline in our previous post, we also need to create merchant personas. As with the consumer personas are merchant personas are based directly on our interviewees and serve to inform and guide our design process.

We ultimately created two merchant personas, with each being a different type of small merchant. One persona is Joy, the merchant who has been in the industry for a long time. She is used to doing things the “old-fashioned way” and is worried about competition from larger businesses. In the artifact below you can explore Joy, her goals/motivations, and fears and frustration in depth.

The other persona is Jasmine, who although established is a little newer to being a small business owner. She is more open to trying out new technology and marketing methods. Like Joy she also cites that the lack of large profits is a struggle.

Superuser Consumer Personas

In addition to our new merchant personas, we also created a superuser persona to round out our set of consumer personas. Olivia is based on the set of superuser interviews we did and the amalgamation of findings from those interviews.

Olivia is a young professional who is trying to balance her student loan repayments with her personal spending. She uses a variety of different cash saving technologies including cash-back apps in an attempt to save money. She struggles with finding the most relevant cashback app that also offers her the most value for her time.

Consumer Storyboard & Prototype Speed Dating

Our team speed-dated both the customer storyboards and prototypes we showed you in our last medium post with a total of 5 users. Because all of these interviews were remote, we used zoom to interact with participants and get feedback on the prototypes. For each storyboard and prototype that was created, each team member created questions to facilitate the conversation to make sure we were getting pointed responses that we could compare in our analysis. We also showed all the storyboards first, and got feedback on the overall ideas. Then we showed the prototypes, and got more detailed feedback. It was definitely a good decision to show both in this session. Sometimes after a user saw how the idea could actually be implemented, they were more open and interested in using an app like the one shown.

After the speed-dating sessions, our team met to discuss the feedback. Overall, users liked the idea of the restaurant tracking idea, especially those who liked to try out new restaurants and support local businesses. The idea that got the most negative feedback was a debit-card linked profile idea. Most users thought it felt too intrusive, and felt skeptical about sharing too much information. Overall, this was a great exercise for us, as we could tell what users liked and didn’t like. Although we are not moving forward with all the ideas, we can still implement features from other ideas that people found valuable.

Narrowing Down and Refining Ideas

After the consumer speed dating session our next step was to narrow down our ideas so that we weren’t spread too thin going forward. Based on consumer feedback, we chose the “restaurant passport” idea because of the unanimous positive feedback. This idea was centered around the idea of users getting deals at restaurants they had not yet been too. Users would be able to track where they had been and what they ate. Two findings that informed this idea were that merchants wanted clear metrics on if they were getting new customers and if customers were returning; and consumers wanted to support local merchants and the way they did this the most was by purchasing at local restaurants.

Additionally, after receiving positive feedback from the faculty and client, we decided to pursue the investment idea. In this idea users can invest their money in local businesses. They’ll receive perks in the form of card linked offers, and other reward types for investing in the business. In addition, they’ll receive offers from similar local businesses that these users would be interested in. One finding that informed this idea was that many consumers saw investment as a way of saving money. In addition, people cared about supporting local businesses. We saw that one way users could support local businesses is by investing in them.

For both of these ideas, it was clear that there was still some ideating that needed to be done to fully flesh these out and to evolve these ideas into more high level CLO solutions. We split up into two groups to focus more on the individual ideas.

For the “restaurant passport,” we thought more about the value this app could offer merchants in addition to consumers. For merchants, we already knew we wanted to show them how many new customers they got through the app and how many return customers they got from those first time customers. We also realized some statistics they would not already get from their PoS would center around age: how many customers the restaurant had in each age group, and how they spend, as well as comparing this to the industry average in their area- to help them decide what demographics to better target.

Additionally we thought the merchant side of the “restaurant passport” could help owners better track which dishes led to more return customers- the percentage of customers that returned after trying a dish the first time. This way owners could figure out how to better curate their menu to retain customers.

Finally, for both the merchant and consumer side, we thought implementing a group based community aspect could add a lot of value. For consumers it would allow them to form groups with their friends and view where their friends ate, what they ate, and what restaurants and dishes they liked. This would encourage consumers to visit new restaurants knowing that their friends, whom they trust, enjoyed it and liked specific dishes. They would also feel more confident about knowing what to order at a new restaurant. For merchants they would be able to see anonymized group information that included information such as taste profile, money spent, etc, and they would be able to target and promote themselves to these groups based on these different factors, potentially getting more relevant customers.

For the investment idea, we decided that we wanted to focus more on investing in local businesses, rather than buying stocks. From our other ideas, people really liked the idea of supporting local communities, and given the current COVID-19 situation, now, more than ever, small businesses need help. For those that do not invest, investing in stocks seemed very unfamiliar to them, and felt like they needed guidance on how to do it. For investing in local businesses, we wanted to follow models similar to GoFundMe or WeFunder, in which people have visibility into how many have already given money, details about when they would get paid back, and the reasons why these small businesses are looking for investments. In addition, a big concern was the timeframe for small businesses to pay back investors. To make up for this, and to incentivize people to invest, we decided a good direction is to include perks that these small businesses could give to the investors while they are waiting on their returns, like cashback offers, prioritized reservations, or vouchers.

From the merchant point of view, we wanted to make sure that small businesses felt empowered and comfortable having people from their local community support them. A big question we need to validate now is if businesses want people to invest in them, and how they think their relationship might change moving forward. We also want to know what it looks like getting loans from banks, and if this idea could be a better alternative that is less stressful for them. Because of these concerns, we wanted to introduce a ‘pay as you go’ feature, where instead of agreeing to pay back investors on a strict basis, merchants can pay back investors as they have accumulated revenue. To make investors feel comfortable and to increase overall transparency, merchants would have to send reports that include information about sales, customer retention, etc… However, to reduce the stress of creating reports, all of this information would be transferred from their PoS system, and our solution would automatically generate reports.

After collaborating on these features, we moved on to our second iteration of the customer prototype and created a merchant view as well.

Second Iteration of Consumer Prototype and Merchant Prototype

Since one of our goals for this sprint was to collaborate more on designs. We decided to continue working together on the prototype iteration. As mentioned, there are a lot of features we wanted to implement that would provide the most value to both stakeholders.

Here are the screens we have developed so far for the customer facing side of our “restaurant passport.”

The first screen is the home screen of the app. It shows the user recommended restaurants- and is where merchants can target the users in terms of restaurant visibility. It allows the users to search or browse by a type of cuisine. It also shows users restaurants near them. In the second screen you have the restaurant screen where you can see which of your friends liked it, pictures of the restaurant, popular dishes, and special deals that are relevant to you. On the third screen you can see group dedicated information- where your friends have been what they have eaten, and you can search based on different factors. On the last two pages the user can see where they have been before and what they have eaten as well as additional deals they have received.

Below you can see the first two tabs of the merchant view of the app.

The first screen shows general statistics they could find in a PoS. This is so the merchant can find all the information in one place in case they don’t want to continuously go between the PoS software and the merchant view for the “restaurant passport.” On the second page is demographic information related to age, and offers comparisons to industry averages. Normally merchants wouldn’t have access to age information, but because the users have to sign up for the app, that would give them access to ages.

The third page shows merchants data related to first time and return customers. These are specific statistics that merchants have called out as being important to them, especially when determining the value of a marketing program. The fourth page is a sample of what information merchants could see about groups: their taste profile, their age range and average age, as well as spend amounts. The merchants can sort and filter groups, and then target them for offers or increased visibility.

Below are the first four consumer screens for the investment idea.

At a high level, the first screen is the home page that includes an overview of a user’s balance, and how much they have already invested. We decided to make it easier for people to invest money, rather than relying on small cash back amounts to invest. People can transfer money from their savings to invest, or even round up their purchases to the nearest dollar and invest that money.

The second screen includes a list of possible businesses to invest in, with information about how many people have invested, as well as what the pay-back time frame looks like. Once a user clicks on one of the restaurants, they are taken to the third screen which includes more detailed information about why they should invest in this business, as well as information from other investors like the average amount invested. In addition, the different perks based on investment amount is included in the table at the bottom. This aids users in determining how much they want to invest based on the incentives. The portfolio screen shows them all the local businesses they have invested in, and what their returns are looking like. By providing this, users get detailed information about their investments that they can closely watch.

We also wanted to emphasize the card-linked offers by giving the rewards its own menu item. In the screens above, people are able to see the investment perks, including CLOs, of local businesses they invested in. In addition, this solution would also provide CLOs for other businesses that may appeal to them based on their transaction history.

Above are the screens for the first merchant view prototype we created for this investment idea. We decided that this would be available to merchants in either a desktop or tablet view. The first two screens include the registration tabs where a merchant would first sign up their business on this application. They will include information like how much they’re asking for, what type of return of payment they expect to have, and the investment tier details.

The next couple of screens above include their investors’ information, which is all anonymized for privacy reasons. The local business has a full overview of how close they are to reaching their target investment amount, a breakdown of the amounts of investments they’ve received, and ability to pay back investors. They can also see the perks that have been used by different investor tiers, and derive patterns that these investors might be following. This will help the local businesses customize their rewards more.

Using the screens above, merchants have the ability to change these rewards using the screen above if they notice that certain investor tiers are using specific rewards more than others. Finally, we don’t want to create any more burden for these local businesses. This solution will pull metrics from the current PoS systems, and automatically generate investor reports and audit reports that are necessary when investors are part of your revenue model.

Spring Deliverables

We’re almost there! Our team is heads down creating our deliverables, such as a spring presentation, reframing report, and responsive website. Our presentation is in less than a week, so we’re working on creating a great narrative for our audience. One point we’re emphasizing is showing what we’ve created first, and then diving into our process and insights later after our audience has a grasp on our solutions. We are also directly connecting our insights to our design decisions so that it’s clear why we chose to include these features in our apps. We’re really excited to showcase our work at our presentation!

What’s next?

After our spring presentation, our team will focus on getting feedback from merchants about our two ideas. Then, we’ll choose one direction and move forward with it. We’ll also get some much needed down time during a one week summer break before coming back for summer semester. During the summer, we’ll be focusing on the second diamond in the double diamond method — developing and delivering.

Until next time!