Ever Rings: Sprinting a Marathon
For Ever Rings, I was responsible for managing the UX process in my team, designing wireframes and high fidelity prototypes, usability testing, and developing the website using Angular and Bootstrap. To make it really simple, I can tell you in one sentence what happened; I realized that talking to customers is the best way to learn and get lost.
2016: The Backstory
I started Ever Rings with my partner Jake in November 2015. I had recently purchased a ring for my wife, and I felt the experience could be better. I found an amazing supplier in my hometown specializing in custom rings. I saw a huge potential market to make rings that tied in the couple’s story. We could make rings with rock from where they got engaged, use wood from a tree where they first met, or carve out a design to give it meaning.
My vision was that Ever Rings could make customers happy and that could help them have better marriages. I believed, and still believe, that marriage can change lives and change the world. Through another job, I discovered product management and UX and thought that they were the answer to my business problems. I read “The Sprint,” by Jacob Knapp, and decided doing a sprint would be perfect for my team.
April 2017: The Sprint
As the note cards and stickers got unwrapped, I was ecstatic! Jake, myself, and Jake’s friend Brandon started on Day 1 trying to understand the problem. What was happening to Ever Rings? Simply put, we weren’t selling rings like we wanted to. That was due to a lack of traffic to the website. However, I was worried that even after focusing on increasing traffic, sales still wouldn’t increase. I wanted to make sure sending traffic to our site was worth our time and money. I ended up focusing the sprint on answering three questions:
- Can we make the experience simple?
- Can we make the experience enjoyable?
- Can we build relationships online?
We started trying to answer these questions by interviewing ring experts, fellow entrepreneurs, and wedding professionals. These people each gave a different perspective on the questions we had asked. From these conversations, we created a map of what our customers did to buy a ring, as well as other groups involved in that process.
After analyzing the map, I realized from our previous day’s research that our customers were most frustrated while in the custom ring buying process. At this point, the process was a lot of back and forth emails, something our customers wished to change. We decided as a group that this should be the focus of our Sprint.
On day two, I brought six amazing people together and started sketching out ideas. Everyone went around the room and talked about what we had come up. What I loved about the sprint was its objectivity. No one was fighting for their ideas; that was not allowed. Every idea was judged by quality.
Nobody in our group was a designer. We had a speech therapist, business guys, and retail workers. However, all of them were incredible. They all came up with thorough ideas that spoke to the problems discovered on Day 1. Through a dot sticker vote, we ended up deciding to prototype two ideas and test them with users.
Prototype 1: Randy’s Rings
Randy’s Rings was created to test two thoughts. First, we wanted to see if humor could make buying a ring more enjoyable. Second, we wanted to know what users thought of being matched up with a ring expert after taking a survey. This was to be used as a tool to understanding more about the customer before they get on the phone with the business. It does not build a ring for them. Rather, it gives insights into customer stories so we can better serve them.
Prototype 2: MHM Jewelry
MHM was tested to see if customers valued seeing the rings they were matched up with and if that made sense at all. Generally people like building something on their own but this was created to answer the question of simplicity.
I set up interviews with four users who were all engaged to be married within the following year. All of these people ended up being girls, which was actually preferred (in my previous year of business, I had sold 95% of rings to women). I showed them both prototypes, had them talk out loud and listened to their feedback.
I saw a few things from these interviews. First, our users didn’t like how either prototype hid the finished ring. They like how in the MHM prototype they had something to see in the end, while Randy’s Rings didn’t show them anything. The users didn’t understand that Randy’s Rings was just a tool to get in touch with a person.
However, users did like the ability to call someone and talk on the phone if they got lost. In addition, users commented on the humor, saying that it made the experience more fun.
Prototype 3: Ring Builder
Based on this feedback, I was once again stuck. With my team, we stewed for hours trying to understand where we went wrong. In a moment of frustration, I resorted back to another idea I had during the sprint. I made a new prototype in InVision based on feedback we got from these people. We called it the Ring Builder. It was a web app that allowed users to select every element of the ring, change things and see the price change as they built it.
We took it to more people and they started to like it more. They liked the ability to see the price and create their own rings. That was enough for me to pull the trigger and get started developing.
June 2017: Development
I am not a developer but dove headfirst into making the app. I started working on the app using AngularJS, Bootstrap and, my most important tool, Google search. I had finished the front end functionality and was going to Javascript MeetUps to work on synchronizing the back end with the front end. Progress was slowly coming.
July 2018: Lunch with Jeremy
Halfway through my coding, I decided to go to lunch with a friend named Jeremy, a master of product strategy. I explained to him what we did in the sprint, what we found and what I was building. I was hoping he would say, “Rob, you’ve done it!” But he didn’t. Instead, he asked me questions relating to the entire scope of the project. “How did the builder fit in the entire market?” He told me a builder could be easily replicable by competitors and their margins and business models would give them a competitive advantage, something I didn’t consider. My competitive advantage needed to be something people couldn’t steal. I left the lunch without a clear vision and questions whether I was building something customers wanted. And I forgot it was my turn to pay.
July 2017: I interview customers
After lunch, I immediately met with my partner Jake. We talked for hours and came to the conclusion that we were lost. So we did something I am proud of; we called our customers. We wanted to understand what customers wanted. I called three of our most loyal customers and asked them questions about their experience.
The most interesting thing happened. I asked them questions assuming they hated their experience. “I realize that your experience with us was less than ideal.”
They defended us! They would say, “Well actually, I had a great experience with your company. I loved talking to you on the phone and you were so nice and cared about us.” I was blown away and a little embarrassed it took me so long to ask them and that I doubted the hard work my company was doing.
My customers didn’t hate the experience. They were our early adopters, bless their souls. They didn’t care that the experience wasn’t perfect because they believed in what we believed in. The people we interviewed for the first two prototypes were not early adopters. I would place them in the early or late majority. Their insight was helpful as to what to do in the future, but if implemented too soon, could have alienated our customers.
October 2017: We pivot
I decided to scrap the Ever Ring Builder and started to design something totally new. I went back to Sketch and started working on a more simple website we could build quickly. After building a prototype in InVision, I went to the University of Utah for usability testing and realized users could better understand what we were about. The information on the site was intuitive and navigation was simple.
I coded the website using Bootstrap, which in my opinion is man’s greatest invention. The new website had a simple about us page, images showing the kinds of rings we could do, and a scheduling system that allowed users to pick times to talk with us on the phone. From our research, we saw that scheduling a phone call took a lot of time for users. Also, users wanted to quickly see the rings we could make. Through testing, we heard users say those problems were addressed so we shipped it.
January 2018: What I learned
I learned so many things working on this project, but my biggest takeaways were the following:
- I learned that, in a sprint, you can’t test everything. In order to get valuable feedback, you need to go with one idea. I feel like I tested far too many features which made our results unclear.
- I saw that blindly trusting what users say isn’t good UX. Users have great thoughts and insights, but not everyone is the user we want to target. I saw the difference between testing with people who were our customers versus people who likely would never be one.
- I decided to make the builder largely because I believed it would work. I didn’t do nearly enough testing. I showed that to one person through an email and made a decision based on their reaction.
In summary, I am very happy with where Ever Rings is headed. We still need to improve our ring buying experience, reduce emails, and really work to drive traffic. But I believe it is possible.
