Kickstarter — CROWDFUNDING EXPANSION
UXDI @ General Assembly Project 3: Feature Expansion
The Client
Kickstarter is an immense global community that serves to bring creative projects to life. In accordance with their mission, Kickstarter exits as a crowdfunding platform that assists musicians, filmmakers, artists and designers with gaining the support necessary to convert their creative aspirations from dreams into realities. Since its launch in 2009, Kickstarter has amassed a tremendous following of loyal creatives who rely upon the site both for personal promotion and for exposure to new projects.
The Problem/Opportunity
Currently, Kickstarter’s crowdfunding model allows “backers” to support different projects by pledging a specific amount of money to a project on a singular occasion. Projects are only funded if they reach their funding goal by the date predetermined by the “creator”.
The Challenge: Expand Kickstarter’s current business model and user experience to include projects that can be funded on a recurring basis.
The Team
Thankfully, given the time constraints of incorporating a subscription service into Kickstarter’s preexisting model within two weeks, our instructors divided us into groups comprised of three UX designers. Although working within a group setting presents its own set of unique challenges, my teammates and I communicated brilliantly, organized efficiently and learned to balance delegation with collaboration in order to produce a cohesive end result.
To loosely quote our three instructors, of the 12 cohorts that they challenged with our specific project brief , our team addressed the project’s constrains and satisfied both the needs of the creators and the backers. In short — we killed it.
Our Approach
In order to maximize efficiency and best facilitate group collaboration, our team agreed to utilize the Double Diamond approach to the design process.
The double diamond diagram divides the design process into four distinct phases and frames the divergent and convergent stages, while depicting the various modes of thinking utilized by designers.
To stay on track, our team utilized tools such as Trello, Slack and Google Drive to organize deliverables, share files and remain connected.
Discover
The first quarter of the double diamond model marks the start of what I like to call the “sponge phase”. This initial portion of a project begins with an idea or inspiration and is often characterized by extreme discovery and research. In short, we devoted ourselves to conducting market research, talking to users, gathering information, observing behaviors and defining the business and brand matrix.
Competitive & Comparative Analysis
Like all good designers, our team members understood that proper design thinking begins with in-depth research. To this end, we began the first day of our two week sprint with a deep dive into understanding understanding both our client and it’s competitors. Research revealed that within the world of virtual crowdfunding, Kickstarter’s direct competitors are GoFundMe, Indiegogo and Patreon. After identifying theses competitors, our team built a competitive matrix to house our findings. We conducted both qualitative and quantitive analysis of each brand’s current user experience across interfaces.
Additionally, given the nature of our challenge it was necessary to analyze the top subscription service models for the same criteria. Conducting this comparative inquiry would allow us to best understand the intricacies of the subscription service business model and subsequently incorporate these features and heuristics into Kickstarter’s current business. Through research, we identified Birchbox, Dollar Shave Club and the New York Times as the top subscription service providers.
**It should be noted that our team intentionally focused on services that operate on a monthly payment schedule and deliver tangible services. Thus Hulu, Netflix and Amazon Prime were not included in our matrixes.**
Although the bulk of our research sprint focused on assessing the features and heuristics of Kickstarter’s competitors’ web and mobile offerings, our team took care to also assess the various brands from a business perspective.
Brand Specific Research
UX best practice teaches that proper user experience exists at the intersection of the business, the users and the brand. In order to properly expand upon the current business in a manner that its users would adapt to, our team took care to investigate the specifics of Kickstarter’s unique brand.
In order to adhere to Kickstarter’s brand and standards of business, our team took care to identify their mission statement, read their business charter and establish and style guide. In hindsight, this decision not only ensured the proper look of our client-ready deliverables, but laid the ground work towards executing a final product that met the needs of the users and the client.
User Research
As a result of our thorough business centered research, our team of UX designers identified that Kickstarter’s current user base is divided into two distinct categories: Backers and Creators.
As the name implies, the creators are the people or team behind the idea who work to bring the project to life. Likewise, the backers are the folks who pledge contribute money to the creator’s projects.
However, we recognized that if we were to expand Kickstarter’s current model to allow for recurring payment, our interviews would need to include one additional variety of user: the subscribers. Our team defined subscribers as folks who regularly contribute money to a project, cause or business in order to promote its long term development and receive benefits.
Before we could begin the process of interviewing users, we needed to recruit research participants who were adequately qualified to speak to our project’s goals. To this end we developed screener surveys intended to identify qualified potential participants.
Our team utilized two different screener surveys aimed at recruiting crowdfunders (both creators and backers alike) and subscribers.
Our aim in sending out a survey screener intended to reach creators, backers, subscribers or individuals who identified with a combination of user categories was to obtain as many qualified interviewees as possible. Through our approach we received over 45 responses to our screener, and subsequently distilled the applicants down into continuously smaller groups of candidates until we were satisfied with the eligibility and diversity of our participant pool.
Our final interviews were conducted with the assistance of five backers, five creators and five subscribers.
Prior to conducting user interviews, our team sat down and devised three loose interview “scripts” to help direct our interactions. However, we all agreed that the format of our conversations could be altered as necessary in order to best gain an understanding of the pains, pleasures, contexts and behaviors surrounding both crowdfunding campaigns and subscription services.
Affinity Mapping
Following our user interviews our team gathered to synthesize our data within several sessions of affinity mapping.
Jargon: Affinity mapping is a WONDERFUL technique that simplifies the process of gathering massive amount of data and organizing based on natural relationships. In the UX world, it involves MANY multi-colored post-its.
Persona Creation
Following our foray into affinity mapping, we synthesized our findings into distinct categories or personas of users would direct our designs.
In accordance with both the brief and with Kickstarter’s organization, we created both a creator (Maki) and a backer (Pat) primary persona. Additionally, we found it necessary to develop a supplementary subscriber (Katheryn) persona who’s pain points, pleasures, behaviors and needs were referenced in order to direct our design.
Define
The second quarter of the double diamond design approach represents the definition stage in which data synthesis is finalized and design goals are determined. During the discover phase we were focused on solidifying our understanding of how users would best interact with the interface and which features would facilitate their “happy path”.
Our team recognized that successful design hinged on accounting for the specific needs of both the backer and the creator personas, while still considering the subscriber’s motivations and pain points.
Feature Prioritization
Calling upon a technique known as feature prioritization, we catalogued the pain points, pleasures and behaviors of our personas and ideated for corresponding features.
Next we weighed our list of features against both the constraints of our project (<72 hours remained) and our users’ commentary. This comparison allowed us to distill the features into 4 categories:
- Must
- Should
- Could
- Want
MoSCoW = Must, should, could, want. The Moscow Method.
Through employing these feature prioritizing exercising, our team was able to define the features of our MVP or minimum viable product.
This MVP (built to accommodate the features designated “most” and “should”) was designed to facilitate user testing.
Sketching and Ideation
With our features prioritized and our MVP planned, it was finally time to start designing!
To get our creative juices flowing, our team channeled UX idol Donald Norman and ideated through a design charrette.
Design Charrette: a brief, collaborative meeting that encourages team members to quickly collaborate, sketch designs and explore ideas.
While sketching our MVP, our team took care to think like our users, consult the personas and check our designs through an emphatic lens. This level of thinking ensured that our MVP satisfied the needs of our personas and catered to folks regardless of tech empathy. Finally, we talked through our designs from the perspective of each persona and compiled an arsenal of user stories.
(Once we began prototype testing, our team also found user stories to be a wonderful aid in directing user testing.)
User Journeys
With less than three days remaining in our Kickstarter spring, we really stepped up our momentum and began turning our deliverables. After wire-framing the existing site, and handing of the files to my teammates for our subscription revamp, I took to Sketch App Sources and created my very first user journeys.
If I had to select a moment of personal pride during this project, it would certainly be the user journeys. They were a true labor of love, demonstration of my growth as a UX designer and a fantastic example of a client-ready document.
I created two different user journeys, one reflecting Kickstarter’s current user experience and a second reflecting the expected user journey accounting for our expansion.
User Journeys UX’d:
- Each user journey represents one project cycle, consisting of 5 distinct phases: develop, frame, launch, engage, and fulfill
- The green and red areas represent the collective positive and negative experience for all users (both creators and backers), with height indicating the severity of the emotion
- The touch points indicate the interfaces or points of entry that facilitate communication between the users, the brand and the business
The current model illustrates an overwhelming incidence of negativity resulting from both the moments when the creators’ feel embarrassment as a result of directly soliciting funds and the the moments when the backer’s are bombarded by this solicitation. Accordingly, the subscription model reflects a decreased incidents of negativity as the creator is only called upon to solicit directly once before the project is launched.
While it is clear that our final product was intended to mitigate the sentiments of embarrassment in inherent to solicitation, our design also significantly increased the users’ collective positivity. During our user interviews certain comments were made on a reassuring basis, and our design team took note!
Subscribers raved about the “surprise and delight” of receiving a gift in the mail, creators asked for the ability to personalize project pages and backers wanted to feel like they were a part of the project’s longevity. We made sure to account for all of these asks (and more) when incorporating features such as the updates manager, project history timeline and custom outreach lists.
We took care to map out Kickstarter’s current sitemap and integrate our designs into its current IA. All of our changes to site’s IA were contained within one new hyperlink, “My Profile”, located within a secondary navigation dropdown.
Develop
During the developing phase of our project, our team concentrated our collective efforts on testing our MVP and iterating. Our theory was that we should act quickly in order to maximize user testing and see our product through as any iterations as possible in the time allotted.
To begin, we took our MVP sketches and quickly produced a set of paper prototypes. Although clearly a low fi method, we found paper prototyping to be an excellent method of ironing out some major navigational flaws before wire-framing.
We then took our paper prototypes and user comments to our computers, where we digitized our wires and continued user testing.
And of course, the iterating continued…..
After refine, and accounting for the results of our user testing through several rounds of iteration we prototyped our medium fidelity designs using InVision and (of course) kept testing!
Finally, we pulled out all the stops in using Sketch, Axure and InVision to produce a functional prototype. Our prototype is can be used from both the creator and the backer perspective to meet the ends:
Creator: compose a customizable update to current project via the update manager or create a new project
Backer: donate to a project on a recurring basis
Deliver
The final quarter of the Double Diamond model represents the “delivery stage” in which targets are met, projects are delivered and the feedback loop continues.
After two wonderful and sleepless weeks James, Eric and I finally presented our project, including a walk through of both the medium and the high fidelity prototype (linked bellow, with hotspot hinting on).
Medium fidelity:
Click here to view the project `Kickstarter Adding Recurring Payment`
7-Build
projects.invisionapp.com
High fidelity:
Next Steps
Of course, in a perfect world our team would have the time and the budget to complete our project according to our dreams. If this world were that utopia, these would be our next steps:
Short Term
- Continue user testing and iterating.
- Add breadcrumbs to the interface
- Design for mobile
Long Term
- Incorporate a live chat functionality
- Allow creators to edit the funding duration of a project after launch.
CliffsNotes
Opportunity: Kickstarter wants to expand in order to allow projects to be funded on a repeated schedule.
Approach: Expand the scope of Kickstarter’s current crowdfunding platform to allow for recurring donations through implementing a subscription payment model and supplementary features.
Projected Outcome:
- Reduce the need for creator to solicit funds directly and thus, the feeling of embarrassment
- Increase backer connectivity to project
- Allow for influx of funds before project’s completion
- Increase website traffic
