Overview

Viledge, a website that sells Black-owned brands, wants to learn how to motivate customers to purchase their new business model on curated subscription boxes.

Viledge curates themed boxes and pairs them with exclusive online experiences. Previously, Viledge’s business model and website was based on a group buying experience. The founder wanted to shift the business in the direction of theme-based experience boxes.

The goal of this project was to conduct user research and create mid-fidelity wireframes on what customers wanted to see on their new upcoming website in order to motivate them to purchase the subscription boxes.

Goals

Viledge wants to make it easy and fun to support Black-owned businesses. They aim to close the racial wealth gap by curating Black-owned brands in one place.

The boxes aim to promote and increase sales for Black-owned brands. With the growing racial wealth gap, there’s a way to close the gap by directing capital to Black-owned businesses through commerce.

We wanted to identify what information users wanted to see about a brand in order to sell the value of subscribing in order to get the experience boxes.

Target Users

Viledge’s target users are value-driven shoppers.

Viledge targets educated, conscientious consumers who are the tastemakers of their social circle. They seek out meaningful experiences and showcase their values with what they buy.

Research

We set up interviews by emailing a provided list of users and created a research discussion guide aimed at understanding users’ motives, behaviors, and experiences with engaging with a brand.

Research goals:

• How do people discover new products and services?

• What makes people feel connected to and inclined to purchase from a brand?

• What are people’s experiences with subscription boxes (if any)?

• How do people share products that they love with their social media network?

• What are people’s experiences and thoughts about digitally connecting with a brand after receiving a product?

• What are people’s preferences in how brands follow-up with them after receiving a product?

We made a user interview discussion guide using Google Docs and conducted 14 interviews over Zoom and Google Hangouts.

We did affinity mapping to get themes and insights from our user interviews. This helped us develop our persona and create our problem statement to narrow our focus.

Problem statement: Lusana wants to know the product she buys will be something she will enjoy because she doesn't want to waste time/money. How might we help Lusana sign up for Viledge with confidence knowing that she is both supporting small Black-owned businesses while receiving high quality products and resources that she will find useful?

Design

We did design studio to collaboratively generate as many ideas. Our focus when designing the website was providing information that our users wanted to see when it comes to feeling connected to a brand.

We had to keep in mind both the user and business goals. The intersecting goal was to purchase the boxes so we prioritized that on the site hierarchy. We had to make it an easy buy-in process for the user by providing the information that they need to feel connected to the brands.

We sketched the pages that were essential for the path to purchase flow that the user goes through. We did a design studio session in which we sketched ideas rapidly on paper, pitched, and critiqued each other’s design solutions based on the problem. This saves time by collaboratively generating as many ideas to know if a solution works before moving onto the digital phase. We converged all of our ideas into a final sketch.

Usability Testing

Doing a low-fi prototype and usability test allowed us to get quick feedback from our users to test our design solution.

We used our paper sketches and prototyped it in InVision for a round of usability testing with 5 people.

What we found from our usability test:

• Users thought that the ‘My Account’ page was a typical profile page where they can adjust their preferences or settings rather than see exclusive member-only content. This let us know that we had to change the wording to make it more clear.

• There isn’t much copy on the low-fi, thus not giving users enough context to how the subscription model works. This can cause a bit of confusion as it does not directly say ‘Shop’ or ‘Buy’ and can be seen as a mailing list button as opposed to joining the membership.

Providing more context through copy and images in the mid-fi prototype helped us see that users can successfully accomplish all usability tasks.

We iterated on the design of our mid-fi prototype based on feedback from our initial usability test. The changes we made were effective as we usability tested with 6 users and found that they were able to successfully accomplish all tasks.

High-Fidelity Wireframes

Takeaways and Next Steps

Encourage customers to actively engage with Viledge during their unboxing.

While our team made important discoveries on how to motivate customers to purchase on the website, we want to address our stakeholder’s further business needs on the post-purchase unboxing experience. We would like to conduct additional user research on how to encourage customers to actively engage with Viledge during the unboxing process with the goal of promoting Black-owned brands. We want to find out how we can bring this traditionally offline experience back online at the time of unboxing so customers can continue to support Black-owned brands. Viledge is set to launch their new website in February 2021.