Adding a quiz feature to Planet 4
A partnership between university students from the Everett Program and the Greenpeace International Planet 4 team
This post is co-authored by Joshua Glasberg, Ashley Hii, Sam Garbus
About the Everett Program
The Everett Program is a year-long program at UC Santa Cruz which mentors students in technical skills–including social media management, UX design and research to name a few — throughout the year, enabling students to apply these technical skills for environmental and social justice efforts at a partnering nonprofit organization. This year, Greenpeace International partnered with the Everett Program and we are so ecstatic to apply our UX design and research skills to one of the many impactful projects at Greenpeace, Planet 4.
The challenge
Quizzes are often used by campaigns as an engagement tool, but there is currently no easy way for campaign staff to quickly create and publish engaging quizzes on Planet 4. A commonly requested feature by NROs (Greenpeace’s National/Regional Organizations) is a quiz builder for campaign staff to easily make interactive quizzes to educate people on campaign initiatives or relevant environmental facts and publish it in various formats on campaign websites.
The quiz feature
In response to this, we planned and initiated the process of developing a quiz feature to enable staff members to create highly engaging quizzes for Greenpeace website visitors’. These quizzes are intended to provide users with an entertaining, yet informative, experience that may motivate them to take direct action towards an environmental issue.
Investigating user needs
To start off, we conducted user research to identify the pain points faced by two main user groups — people who take the quiz and staff that make the quiz. We conducted heuristic evaluations of quizzes previously published by various campaigns to plan out what requirements the end product should meet in order to provide the best user experience. We also met with NRO stakeholders and conducted 1:1 interviews to learn about their past experiences and frustrations when creating and publishing quizzes.
After conducting multiple evaluations and interviews, we learned that website visitors were unable to have a seamless, entertaining experience while taking a quiz and staff members were unable to quickly create visually-engaging quizzes. To evaluate potential solutions, we compiled a list of design, technical and testing requirements that the ideal solution should meet.
Some examples of requirements are:
- Be able to move through questions without losing progress or submitting answers
- Share personalized results through social media, copying the link, etc.
- Easy to insert images or GIFs
- Ability to post as embedded block or standalone page
- Be able to provide more engagement opportunities at the end of the quiz
Exploring potential solutions
We explored various quiz builders and WordPress plugins but unfortunately, none of the existing tools met the needs of our users. We presented all of our findings to the Planet 4 Council and by the end of the meeting, everyone came to an agreement that a custom tool would be the most efficient solution. This left us with the opportunity to create a custom feature that can provide the optimal experience for all user groups. Our next step: get designing!
Designing our custom solution
We based the design on several user stories:
- As a user, I want to learn about environmental issues so that I can educate others.
- As a user, I want to be able to learn about environmental issues so that I can make a better impact on a personal level (by learning about personal habits, effects of my actions, etc.)
- As a user, I want to be able to learn about Greenpeace so that I can learn how to get involved in Greenpeace.
- As a user, I want to learn about Greenpeace, so that I can make a decision on whether I want to donate or not.
- As a user, I want to learn about Greenpeace, so that I can learn how to get involved in Greenpeace.
- As a user, I want to find accurate information, so that I can find more detailed information pertaining to particular environmental issues I’m already passionate about or just learned about.
- As a user, I want to learn more about environmental issues so that I can take direct action (such as sign petitions, volunteer, etc.) to make an impact.
With the user stories in mind, we created user flows to plan how website visitors would discover and walk through the quiz.
Lastly, we created the wireframes for the design that website visitors would encounter on campaign websites.
What’s next?
Although our time at Greenpeace has ended, we have handed off our work to the design team to finalize the design and development of the backend for the quiz feature. We hope this feature will help NROs and users worldwide and we hope to see this project launch soon!
Reflection on our summer with Greenpeace
When we first entered this project, we had not worked on a real-world project before and felt a bit nervous about whether or not we could deliver what was needed. However, the Planet 4 team assured us that we would do well and was always there to give us guidance and feedback when we needed it. Using technical skills we learned from the Everett Program, we were able to help Planet 4 with investigating user needs and assessing possible solutions. We feel we were able to give Planet 4 a good place to build from as they move onto wrapping-up the final design stages and shipping the final product. We are proud to have been able to contribute our skills to address user needs and learn from many passionate people at Greenpeace, an organization so dedicated to so many issues that are important to us.
We’re grateful to be a part of this team and help contribute to a real world project. We had many valuable experiences that we could not experience elsewhere, including working with NROs worldwide and designing for a wide set of users. We feel that our impact with the Planet 4 team will go on to create more awareness in the world for a range of environmental issues and help make a real difference!
