ABOUT THE PROJECT
Enhancing user engagement and creating viral-loops for education savings fund platform 🎓
CONTEXT
For this project, I had the opportunity to work with Pelican, a startup company who are on mission to empower families to save smarter, save more and achieve their financial goals for their children's education.
Ali, CEO/Founder came to us to seek new potential ideas and design to increase user engagement and create viral-loops to retain more users. Our goal was to deliver high-fidelity mock-up on time for the Demo Day for Pelican to present the product and new features to investors.
Role
Product Designer
TEAM
Emily Cho (Product Designer)
client
Duration
7 weeks
August - October 2023
about company
Who is Pelican?
Savings Platform for your child
With Pelican, families can easily set up education savings accounts, access expert recommendations tailored to their specific needs, take advantage of smart investment options that maximize tax savings and minimize financial aid reduction, and enable contributions from family and friends to support their journey. Our platform streamlines the entire process, allowing families to confidently navigate the world of education savings and achieve their financial goals faster.
goal
Deliver MVP of new feature designs to increase user engagement
Our goal
The team already had key main features thought out, and they were in need of layering on some features that would enable engagement and user delight for users to come back and sign-up and further pull-us apart from the competitors.
On top of the new feature design, I did want to revamp the UI design in general from color, typography, and composition in general as there was visibly in need for improvements. But after chatting with the CEO, the priority was to focus on the flow and the product - so we pushed the UI revamp further down the roadmap.
The current UI design needed a revamp and had room for lots of improvement.
PERSONA
2 main user groups
We were provided with the 2 main personas that had been previously created by the team.
insight
Hesitancy asking for non-traditional gifts
How can we make the gift-giving experiences on Pelican as intimate and warm as traditional gift-giving experience?
An interesting takeaway that stood out to me was parents' hesitancy around asking for non-traditional gifts from their families and friends.
Conventionally gifters would pick out a meaningful gift to their loved ones giving lots of thought and consideration to what would best suit the receiver or express their love. Suggesting to gift money instead to the child's savings are very meaningful but could come off as transactional of dollars and take away the warm and intimate gift-giving experiences. To me reimplementing this seemed to be at the core of driving engagement of gift giving and converting new users.
Current wireframes
Static experience of transactioning $$
Static experience
The current design of Gift Sending was quite bare to the bones, missing some basic elements such as scheduling a date to send gift. There were steps where users could fill out Occasion and type in Message but overall it lacked life to the experience of sending gifts, felt more like a check-out experience when you transfer money.
Original wireflow of Gift Sending
Competitor analysis
How are competitors handling personalization?
We've looked at 3 different direct competitors and researched around how their designing the flows around 'Gift Send' experience or any other personalizable delight moments.
Some elements of personalization
Each competitor had different levels of personalization when sending gifts or contributions to the fund. They all had pros and cons, for example, Backer had the least personalization but it was very straightforward experience that was very easy and simple for the first time user.
Competitor analysis on Gift Sending experience
Terravita was falling behind compared to competitors in most aspects. But that meant more room for improvement and new ideas. Let's move on to the next step I took to help users and Terravita.
ideate
Creating amazing experiences at touch points to convert users
Ideal viral-loop scenario
I created a Scenario Flow of how the ideal viral-loop would play out for us based on my instinct and competitors flow.
The 'starred' phase was where I identified as the key action points where we needed to encourage our users to share the fund and send a gift meanwhile we giving unique and memorable experiences.
Ideal viral-loop scenario
Features to increase engagement
After conducting more research and pulling more ideas, I presented different ideas and keywords to CEO, and these are the 3 keywords and features that we decided to focus on for the project during the workshop.
Unique Personalization
To spread word of mouth and give a memorable experience of Gift Giving
Social Media
Users are part of building the Fund Page, community aspect
Share/Referrals
To encourage users to refer more users
Design & Iteration
Finding the balance of fun and simple experience
Strategy
Our goal was to make the gift-giving experience fun and personalized, but we didn't want to overburden with users with extra steps for those who didn't want to go through. Finding the right balance of how to were one of the main challenges when we were sketching out ideas.
Send Gift page design
Our initial idea was to give users the option to simply write the message on the same page as they decide on gift details but also have the option to customize further if they choose to.
But the more I thought about the design, the interface looked cluttered, making it look like another step to fill out.
I redesigned the side panel removing the shortcut customization features and replaced with a clear CTA button to write a message which would lead to a lightbox mode of writing card & customization (previously, clicking customization button would lead to a new page.)
Sketch iterations of Send Gift page
2-1. Card Customization
We designed different iterations to design the best layout of how we can customize and what features would make the gift card writing fun such as stickers, photos, and color options for backgrounds and texts.
Initially, we landed on Option D, but after sleeping on the idea, a thought came to mind this feels fun, it could be overwhelming for some users, especially more senior users.
1st iteration of Card Customization
2-2. Balancing customization and ease of use with help of AI card writer ✨
After rethinking and chatting with the engineer, I combined the idea of implementing Ai card writer in card writing flows and minimizing the card customization features to essential. Users would still have a personalized experience picking out cards and editing fonts and colors.
There were 2 options I was contemplating on the side-by-side view (opt. e-1) vs. the floating cards view (opt. e-2), but I decided to go with the former as it would be straightforward for larger groups of users.
2nd iteration of Card Customization
Fund page re-design
The current fund page design was minimal, just a message and a photo of the fund beneficiary. We wanted to give breath and life to it to encourage visitors to engage in gift-giving and rooting for the child's future.
To achieve this,
Fund page re-design
How can we make the gift-giving experiences on Pelican as intimate and warm as traditional gift-giving experience?
deliver
It takes a village & lots of ❤️ to raise a child
Gift & card selecting
Gifters can free-type the gift amount or select different Gift plans to send recurring gifts for special days. And choose different card designs from the library.
Customizing & writing cards with Ai Card Writer
To balance the delightful and easy experience of writing the card, users can write messages on the card freely or with the help of AI Card Writer to easily draft a message. For customization, we kept it simple where users can edit card & text colors.
Create invitation to friends & familes
On top of the sharing fund link to friends & families, we wanted users to have the option of creating an invitation to make it more personable for both the inviter and the receiver, where the receiver will receive a delightful animated invitation.
Engaging Fund Page
We redesigned the fund page view with more engaging content for visitors to feel like they are participating and part of the intimate community supporting the beneficiary's future.
Customizing Cards
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Customizing Cards
We took an approach to making the website visually accessible. We re-designed pages that were rows of text walls by adding more images and breaking them down into groups. All of the paragraph width were reduced to only include an appropriate amount of letters to boost legibility.
learning
What did I learn?
I’ve received positive feedback from users that the site was easy to navigate with just the right amount of information. Re-designing for Terravita was an enjoyable and meaningful experience and an opportunity to connect and empathize with other plant lovers. Plus, I've got to learn more about different plants!
Thank you for reading through my journey of Terravita makeover!
Next steps
UI revamping, accessibility, & mobille view
End to end visitor experience from online to real-life
The website experience represents only a fraction of the overall park experience, serving as a platform for visitors to gather information and build excitement. Conducting comprehensive research and gaining a thorough understanding of the complete end-to-end park experience is crucial. Due to constraints in resources and time, our team could not be physically present at park, however we were able to overcome this constraints by establishing communication with park agents and through secondary research.
Thank you for taking the time to read!