Presently.fun Website Redesign

Project: Presently.fun 

My Role: User research, UX Design

Duration: 2.5 Week sprints

Team: 3 Designers

Platform: Responsive website

Tools: Figma, Adobe Illustrator, Photoshop, Google Suites (sheets, slides, docs), Trello, Miro, Pen & Paper

Client Overview

Presently is a group-gifting platform that makes it easy for friends and families to crowd-fund towards a single more meaningful gift. Their platform reduces the amount of waste in landfills, encourages favorable child development, and eases the pains that are associated with gift searching.

The Challenge

Presently is gaining momentum in their website traffic biut is lacking in conversions. By having their homepage and mission only marketed towards those with children, Presently is missing out on a larger audience that can generate more conversions. In addition, users are onboarded with a lengthy and at times confusing form with no account creation afterward.

Learning about the Business

In order to gain a better understanding of Presently’s platform, we researched the company and dissected the information deck provided by our client. Because the work was remote, I also prepared questions to ask our client prior to our video conference so that no questions would be missed.

Our goals in the phase was to understnad Presently background/culture, users, problems and goals.

What we learned

• Presently was created as a solution to tackle clutter and waste gathered from excess amounts of toys.

• Since waste accused from toys was one of their biggest concerns, their main user was at first the “millennial parent” however, they now want to scale the platform to include all adults.

• The current onboarding for the '“parent” and “adult” experiences are currently indifferent and they hope to differentiate the experiences somehow.

• Kids are also involved via the parent hot-portal and Presently want us to account for the “kid experience as well.

Identifying Key Issues 

To identify key issues, we conducted a heuristic evaluation using Jakob Nielsen’s 10 usability heuristics. We went through the tasks of onboarding, sharing, and contributing to document the encountered issues that violated the heuristics and usability qualities. The most crucial violations found were inefficiencies within the onboarding, which required information users may not have yet, and the lack of account creation for hosts.

 User interviews

Since Preasetnly already had a user base it was important for us to speak with those that already had experience with the platform as well as potential users, as the ask was to expand the base to include single adults. We conducted ten user interviews where we got to know what they expected from a platform like this and we assigned tasks where, depending on their status, we had them examine the homepage, go through the onboarding process, share the group gift through email, and send a contribution as a guest. From all these interviews we created an Affinity map. Below are some of our key takeaways.

Persona

After gathering the data, I created a user persona who would best represent Presently’s ideal host and contributor. From here on out I could reference Bessie through the process to understand how our design decisions would best help the user.

 After putting a face to the ideal user I created a problem statement to take her on a journey.

Bessie is a mother of two, and she is feeling guilty about the amount of unused toys her kids have. She needs to reduce the number of gifts her children will receive but faces the challenge of organizing her friends and family to participate in a way that doesn’t feel like she's soliciting. 

Bessie’s Journey

To serve as a visualization of the process Bessie goes through with the current Presently site we created vs the site we had updated we created two journey maps. One to emphasize Bessie’s pain points during onboarding and also when she is unable to share/edit the created event via the provided portal. We needed this to show the client just how necessary it was for an account creation feature.

Narrowing our focus

Combining all our data we created a list of the main issues encountered. Once we had that list of problems, we then created a list of features that we believed would solve those pain points. I then took those features and created a feature prioritization chart. This charting helped us to identify which features we would prioritize.

• Account creation

• Account dashboard

• Editing capabilities within the account

• Sharing features with the account

• Creating a new group gift within the account

Analyzing the current flow

First we created a user flow for the host and the contributor side of the current site. Combined with our research data, this allowed us to clearly mark which areas needed improvements.

We had three main issues of concern:

1. Deciding which information to be asked during the onboarding

2. Placement if the signup screen (before, during, or after onboarding question)

3. How to widdle the question down to streamline the process

The challenge was striking a balance between asking as few questions as possible making onboarding quick and easy, and having enough required information so the user wouldn’t feel overwhelmed having to answer these questions later.

Streamlining the user flow

Multiple rounds of testing and iteration would lead us to this new host user flow. My teammate created which includes an onboarding broken up into 8 screens, with an account creation screen being the last, and sharing functionalities within the platform.

Enhancing the style, maintaining the brand

During our testing, we received positive feedback regarding the way the site looked and feels, we also discovered that the page was overwhelmingly kid-focused. So, we created this style guide to keep the joy users felt, the main color palette was kept but we added in some pastels to help ease the contrast. Also added, was some green to help symbolize what we felt would make Presently stand out, conscious consumerism, and the environmental impact from using this platform.

Test & Iterate

The majority of our work consisted of creating brand new sets of screens within the onboarding, which were previously blocks of text. We conducted multiple design studios taking the most compelling sketches and transformed them into a streamlined set of screens via low fidelity.

The test results were staggering. By reducing the amount of information asked during onboarding (previously 15 to 6 questions) by too much, it appeared to leave all tested users not realizing that they had just created a hosted gift. After the users finished onboarding, and landed on the account dashboard, users were confused about how to continue or proceeded to “create a new group-gift,” even though they had already done that during onboarding.

Back to the drawing board

After our first round of low-fi testing yielded poor results, it was back to the drawing board. Our team was in conflict when it came to the placement of the sign-up screen being placed before or after onboarding. To resolve this, we decided for our next round of testing, we would test half our user’s with the account creation screen before onboarding and the other half after the onboarding.

I iterated based on the results of our low-fi tests and created our medium-fidelity wireframes. With our mid-fi frames, we conducted 5 more usability tests.

KEY CHANGES

• Increased the amount of questions asked during onboarding (6 to 11 questions)

• Combined 2 different screens from our previous iteration on the host portal to help with scaling and efficiency

• Added a confirmation modal after onboarding to provide feedback that a gift has been created

• Switched to top navigation instead of side to help with labelling and visibility

WHAT WE FOUND

• Although the increase in information asked during onboarding fixed the previous issue, which left users not realizing that they had created a gift, we now had too many questions asked. We still had to find the perfect medium.

• We had inconclusive results regarding the sign-up screen placement. Users stated that they felt indifferent. We realized since users were not presented with both flows during our test, the test results were therefore invalid.