A joint Design Sprint to reconnect with the P4 concept: the creation of the 2 prototypes.
Post 1 of 4 of how Greenpeace tested new engagement features for the future of our websites
Part 1 | Part 2 👉 | Part 3 👉| Part 4 👉
As V1 of Planet 4 was coming to an end, we started to surface from the herculean task just achieved — launching 45 websites and covering 86% of Greenpeace online presence. We knew we needed to start to build engagement functionalities… But how? Where should we start? What pieces of this complex jigsaw would come first?
Sometimes a fresh pair of eyes and ears can help a team that has been focused on platform rollout to see the next steps forward. We knew the main engagement requirements and assumptions — having them listed in great detail in P4’s initial scoping document. However, we needed a space and external moderation to provide us with a clear sounding board. Someone with the tools to help us scope out the next steps — this was kindly provided (free of charge) by the amazing open source advocates RedHat.
To kickoff both the Greenpeace / RedHat partnership and the creative phase of “Planet 4 V2”, it was decided we needed a design team retreat. A creative environment to remember, raise, discuss and analyse our ideas on engagement not only on P4 but on the organisation’s other engagement tools — this is what the RedHat design sprint of May 2019 was all about.
After an initial two days of tasks, discussion and debate about engagement, audience and Greenpeace’s practices, achievements and goals, we began to create several different user stories. The team mapped out all the potential points of engagement and began to see the moments when a user’s journey through P4 could connect with other engagement tools, potentially leave and perhaps come back. These points varied from following campaigns and signing petitions right through to taking part in beach cleaning events and visualizing impact.
Discussions and ideas ranged far and wide — from the requirement for a single sign-on process and how that would technically work across different tools; Right through to ‘sign on is a barrier’ and how far P4 could go with no sign-on and using just cookies.
By the last day, the team had created two clear paths of engagement everyone believed worth exploring:
Prototype #1 (see video intro), A non-signed-in experience that utilised cookies and provided the following features:
a. Follow a campaign
b. Campaign tailored content upon repeated visits
c. An Impact visualization showing achievement and impact stats
d. Time-based challenges with small, medium and large time commitments
e. Taking part in a local beach cleaning event.
Prototype #2 (see video intro), a signed-in experience with all the features of a non-signed in experience plus all the add features a signed-in experience would provide the user, such as:
a. Single sign-on on all Greenpeace tools
b. User onboarding
c. Personalised content based around interests, location and activity type
d. A user home page showing the progressive tasks, activities and actions
e. Achievements tracking with badges & gamification
f. A user profile section for users to manage personal settings, see individual achievements and receive invitations to new challenges.
With these two pieces of work, we finished the RedHat design sprint. For us at P4 it had been a really great experience. It reconnected all our beliefs in creating an Engagement Platform and gave us really dynamic, creative new ones. It made us remember and reaffirm our dream/goal ‘to create a truly dynamic engagement platform’.
The next step was to test the logic and assumptions behind this work; we decided to make two interactive prototypes utilising InVision.
After some initial input from RedHat, it was decided that Magali (our amazing UX designer) and myself should design and build them. Over June and early July, we created the two prototypes. We designed them to work on a mobile platform because of the behaviour patterns of our two key audience types Gen Z & Y. We then shared the prototypes with the core P4 development team and made adjustments based on their feedback.
Once this was done, we wrote a testing criteria document, listing all questions and assumptions around the two journeys. We then handed the two prototypes over to an external testing agency, UX Studio, which will author the next chapter on this journey is ‘A focused analysis — moderated testing’.
