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47% increase
in draft to order conversion
86% increase
in the number of users who complete & order their album within 24 hours of starting an album
Less confusion. Creation to order time decreased. More album orders submitted.
Adding guidance via social proof callouts and more details surrounding how edits (such as additional pages and changes in material selections) impacted pricing resulted in couples feeling more empowered to make decisions faster and build an album that fit within their budget.
Zola is quickly becoming a full wedding ecosystem, but every bride and groom knows the traditions don't end after the DJ spins his last reception track. Realizing the implications of post-wedding traditions and the potential for an additional touchpoint (outside of thank you cards and registry management) in the post-wedding funnel, Zola decided to provide users with a new, robust post-wedding product: custom wedding albums.
Users wanted albums, and they wanted them fast, so the product team quickly cranked out an MVP. However, shortly after launching the MVP, it became clear there were several major pain points and the product was costing the company money. Issues arose relating to everything from order conversion, holes in the overall user flow, and the tech implemented not being up to par. Users were dropping off early in the album customization process and the product pitfalls resulted in a lot of support tickets, credits, an even full refunds.
As it became clear (through live-instance metrics and financial reports) Zola Albums had several issues, my teammate Kemy and I set out to find out exactly how users felt those issues could be improved and which were the most frustrating. After all, the technology and internal workflows used to launch Zola Albums was new territory, so we could not afford to fix everything at once nor miss the mark on execution.
After completed a very in-depth competitive analysis, it became apparent we were lacking in several areas; but we didn't find any competitor served as the ideal. We partnered with the business team to pinpoint 7 users to interview, most of whom we could see uploaded photos and dropped off at different points and one user actually ordered and received an album. Kemy and I teamed together to conduct interviews, about an hour long each, via Zoom. These interviews proved to be more valuable than the team could have anticipated, resulting in insights neither us nor our competitors did a great job addressing. We decided to conduct an additional twenty, unmoderated usability tests on the live MVP via usertesting.com.
Combining the synthesized insights from our user interviews, user testing, and competitive analysis, the team was able to come up with 6 different user stories, resulting in 6 defined feature sets. I tackled feature sets 1-4, while Kemy tackled 5-6. My overall goals when tackling my 4 sub-projects were to aid user education, manage user expectations, add the ability to make customization edits beyond the landing page, and ensure there was price transparency throughout the customization process.
As a part of the overall 10 week sprint, I spent 5 weeks designing feature sets 1-4. Once the designs were handed off to engineering, we went through several iterations of both design and technical QA and the features finally went live. The results of these feature updates were almost instantaneous and the team watched in awe as album sales climbed.
While Zola wishes to be considered a best in class photo album website, it is most definitely not the first. In order to better understand not only what Zola was lacking but where there were opportunities for us to stand out, we first had to gain an in-depth understanding of the user experience our competitors offered. As a result, I embarked on the arduous journey of creating wedding albums on 10 competitor sites, including, but not limited to: Artifact Uprising, Shutterfly, Minted, & Papier, and compared the experiences to Zola. I quickly felt not only the pain we inflicted upon our happy couples, but the astoundingly frustrating experiences our better-known album competitors provided, which I realized may have pushed customers to try Zola to begin with!
How did competitors handle photo uploading, resolution communication, & auto-cropping?
Aspects reviewed over 37 slides:
In what sequence did competitors have customers complete the seps required to complete an album and submit an order?
Aspects reviewed over 122 slides:
I presented these findings to the team and it was immediately apparent that while we were missing several features, the main areas we were majorly lacking in were user feedback, encouragement, and proactive error handling.
The competitive analysis gave us a pretty good handle on the what we were missing, but we wanted to talk to couples who had interacted with our existing tool to determine how we would implement. Additionally we needed to ensure we had an answer to the crucial question: why such a high drop-off rate for Zola Albums?
The only way to determine exactly which moments within the album customization flow were frustrating users and why was to speak to them directly. Product partnered with the business team to find 7 users who began customizing a wedding album. All of the users dropped off at different points, and one user actually ordered and received an album (our first and only sale at the time!). Some of the users interviewed were already a part of the Zola ecosystem, and some had never used Zola products. We approached writing the script for these interviews looking to answer three concise questions:
Many hours of conducting and synthesizing interviews led to 6 main user stories:
"I am motivated by my friends and family"
"I benefit from accountability (and verification)"
"I am motivated by material gains"
"I like to track my progress"
Our user research inspired us to build two personas: Maya and Gabby.
One week. Seven interviewees. We aimed to maximize our time by drafting a detailed plan with targeted questions covering:
Many hours of conducting and synthesizing interviews led to 6 core user stories:
Our PM Angela worked to quickly establish the overall scope and timeline, and Kemy and I excitedly got to work.
Using our concept test results combined with the MoSCoW method to identify must have, should have, could have, and will not have features, we began sketching and wireframing a solution:
Once our wireframes were finalized, an interactive prototype was created in order to conduct usability tests. I recruited users and we conducted 11 usability tests in two rounds. Our first round of testing on our original prototype gave us a lot of valuable feedback, which we used to make the following changes:
To add another layer of gamification, we initially had tribe members vote on the challenge the originator invited them to, but users found the process to be lengthy and the language confusing. So we instead opted for a one-step invitation reply with "Accept" or "Decline" as options.
We originally decided checking in, being a main feature in the user flow, should be quick and easy for the user. However, our usability tests responses caused us to reconsider. We felt to facilitate seamless feedback, the check-in button should be within each challenge. This way, users can keep better track of completed check-ins.
Our original design had tribes within the challenges tab in the navigation bar. After noticing users fumbling through the corresponding task, we decided for ease of use that not only should the "Challenges" page be at the center of the navigation bar, but that tribes should be more prominent as well.
Finally, rather than having components of the tribes and challenges on different screens, we decided to include the different challenge pages as swipe-able cards under "Challenges".
After conducting a second round of usability tests, we reached our final design. During our initial meeting, our client requested that, if time permitted, we redesign the logo and overall branding for the app. Despite it being a long three weeks with several ups and downs, we still managed to find time to fulfill the client's request and give WeUp a new face.
Not only did we give the app a new logo in addition to a UI and game mechanics overhaul, but we also added a component that speaks to something our client mentioned in our initial meeting as future business goals. We also wanted to incorporate some of the metaphors our client originally included when the app was more focused on gamification. To incorporate the tree and growth analogies, we made the streaks "s-tree-ks" and visually represented them with a chevron (which is used to denote rank) tree.
Our client eventually wanted to add a social good component to the app by collaborating with different companies and non-profits. While our current scope did not allow for this, we did incorporate the option for winners to donate some of their winnings to a charity or cause in our prototype.
While WeUp is now ready to enter the app marketplace, there are some next steps that should visited before releasing future versions such as:
As for my personal takeaways, this project confirmed to me that I truly love UX and have found my passion. Despite falling ill with Covid-19, I woke up excited to get to work, for as long as I could manage, each day. I didn't push through because I feared letting down my team or the client (they insisted I rest every day), but because working on this project and seamlessly communicating with my team genuinely brought me joy.