Geniest

Overview

Geniest is a mobile app that allows individuals to post and share their wishes. The goal of Geniest is to provide a safe space where “Wishers”, community members with local needs, can connect with “Wish fulfillers,” those with the capacity to effect change. “Wish fulfillers” may include entrepreneurs, organizations, and businesses. The app makes it convenient for Wishers to post wishes, while the data that the platform gathers provides valuable information to paid Subscribers (Wishfulfillers) who can use it to identify opportunities for future growth and development.

The founder of Geniest, Katie Callander, came to my team and I with an exciting opportunity to improve the user experience for the mobile app and design a website portal for Subscribers. I worked as a part of a team with my colleagues, with each of us focusing on a different problem space of Geniest.

The Problem Space

For my project, the problem space I focused on is: How can we increase Wishers’ engagement with Geniest through social interactions? Examples of these digital interactions may include “Likes,” other reactions, comments, messages, etc.

 In general, people are social beings that seek to connect with others. By having features that facilitate positive interactions, this would create a sense of community and increase user engagement and retention. This matters because results from a previous beta user survey has indicated that Wishers are asking, “What now?” after making a wish.

Discovery

Stakeholder Interview & Deep Dive

To learn and better understand where the client is now, what currently exists, and future opportunity areas, my UX design team and I held an interview with one of Geniest’s primary stakeholders, Katie Callander (the founder).

To deepen my understanding of mobile apps, I also completed a “deep dive,” in which I conducted secondary research to better understand common UI patterns and navigation elements as well as the pain points and opportunities of other community-based and social media apps.

Competitive Audit

Next, I conducted a competitive audit, in which I evaluated and compared Geniest with other community-based mobile apps across pre-defined criteria. I learned that Geniest did not offer features for commenting, direct messages, seeing if others “liked” people’s wishes, notifications, and a stories/updates feed, unlike the other apps. These features presented new opportunities to engage users with the Geniest app.

Online Survey & Key Findings

My team and I collaborated to put together and send out an online survey to 26 individuals who reflect the Wisher user group. The key findings helped me better understand how users may engage with the Geniest app and which feature concepts to prototype. They include:

• 82% of respondents reported they would engage with this app as a local community member rather than just anywhere.

• Over 70% of respondents stated they like receiving in-app notifications for “Likes” and comments because they felt acknowledged and supported, indicating in-app notifications is a desired feature.

• 54% of respondents reported that their last memorable negative interaction on a social media app was due to negative comment(s), suggesting that comments may lead to an app becoming a negative environment, if they’re unsupervised.

Design Ideation

Bearing my research findings in mind, I rapidly developed prototype concepts through hand sketches. I hand-sketched early prototype concepts, which included a “Wish Feed,” in-app notifications, push notifications, and direct messages (with others who have re-wished the user’s wish or a Wish-fulfiller). Below are some of my early prototypes.

User Research

Evaluative Research with Mid-Fidelity Wireframes

Using Sketch, I took individual features from the low fidelity sketches and digitized them into mid-fidelity wireframes. Next, I planned, recruited, and conducted in-person and remote user research sessions. The protocol for these sessions involved the following activities: usability testing with the current app, user interview questions, and user evaluation of new feature prototypes.

Key Insights

The key insights I gained from research at this point were:

• Wishers want to know what will happen to their wishes. (Will others re-wish it? Are Wishfulfillers considering it?)

• Wishers want to easily see what others in their local community were wishing.

• Wishers are interested in interacting with Wishfulfillers through the app.

• Wishers want to know if app will make wishes come true. One participant stated,

“…I think it's really important. It's like the main point of the app is to make wishes happen. So…if my own wish comes true, I want to know it.”

Kano Analysis

To prioritize and narrow down which features to further develop, I also conducted a Kano analysis with user feedback that I collected from 7 participants using a survey. Through this analysis, I determined that the following 4 features had the strongest positive reactions from participants (as Performance features, which are features that the more the product provides, the more satisfied the user is):

• “Wish Feed” on the Home Screen that features wishes from the local community

• In-App Notifications that give status updates on the user’s wishes

• Push Notifications regarding if a Wish’s status was updated or fulfilled

• Direct Messages from Subscribers

The Deliverables

Interactive Prototype

To demonstrate the interactivity of my new feature set, I created an Invision prototype that features the Wish Feed, the in-app notifications, and direct messages from Subscribers (Wish-fulfillers). Below, you can view a video of prototype as well as images of the prototype’s key screens. To explore the interactive prototype in Invision, visit this link: https://invis.io/YVUC9F6R3A9#/387993081_New_Home_Page-2px.

Summary of Recommended New Feature Set

Based on the feedback from the user evaluations and the Kano analysis, I moved forward with the feature prototypes mentioned above and re-iterated them into higher fidelity prototypes in Sketch and Invision. This new set of feature prototypes was synthesized into a recommendation summary with descriptions and research findings. You can view the report here.

Updated Information Architecture Diagrams

To better surface the main features and tasks of the Geniest mobile app, I also proposed in my recommendations report that the primary navigation menu would be a new tab bar (versus the hamburger menu of the existing app).

To illustrate how the new tab bar and integration of new features would change the information architecture (IA) of the Geniest app, I put together IA diagrams using Sketch. Below is an IA diagram of the updated navigation of the app with my features. You can view all of my IA diagrams here.

Impact

By incorporating the proposed new features above, this would increase Geniest’s user engagement and retention through more positive interactions between Wishers and Wish-fulfillers, providing visible proof that wishes can come true, and creating a sense of community by having a ongoing Wish feed of the local community’s wishes.

Thank you Geniest for this opportunity to work with you!