Awakening
An App To Grow and Connect In Community
Community was the driving motivation for our members. Coming off a year when I designed a top to bottom rebrand of the organization, we saw an opportunity to continue to innovate and maximize community engagement by developing a member facing mobile app from the ground up.
I was the Product Designer & Creative Lead working on this project with a cross-functional team of developers, communications lead, and community director.
Project type
Development of MVP
Role
Product Designer & Creative Lead
What is the problem?
Digital engagement among our existing community was low and our ability to easily distribute content and resources to our members was inefficient. Everything was being funneled through our website, which left it bloated and made finding relevant content tedious.
We needed to create a way to serve users the content most meaningful to them and provide a way to easily organize and track that content in the midst of their busy lives.
User Research
Survey existing members
It was important that the solutions to our problem be as accessible to as much of our diverse member demographic as possible. We crafted a survey to collect an accurate snapshot of the demographics, needs and blockers of our current members. Over a 3 week period in the Fall we administered our survey through our website and collected over 300+ responses.
From there I went through the design process, creating wireframes and mockups, and then collaborated with our developers to prototype and begin user testing our product. The feedback we received allowed us to continue to refine our solutions and iterate based on challenges that came up.
Finding A Solution
The Card System
Users: Easy access to content, resources and to know what's happening
Organization: Resource our members and increase engagement across all demographics
Product: Content and personalization served in a simple clear structure
Designing the user experience
Onboarding
We made signing up as easy as possible. Users are prompted to enter a username, enter their email and select a password.
Never Miss Out
Knowing what is happening each week has traditionally been a hassle to keep up with for those in the community, especially living in the Silicon Valley with busy on-the-go lives.
The homepage gave our users the most up to date information about "This Week's" information and lets them save any content they want to come back to later.
Engaging With Content
The Read section is where our resources can get distributed to our users. Users can filter by article, talk notes, group study content, and more. Any piece of content users want to save to read later can be favorited and will then be added to the My Favorites section in their profile.
We designed this because a frequent request has been 1) a medium for people to contribute content that can be easily consumed by our community and 2) a way to catalogue content already available for easy access later.
Our goal was to further iterate on this design down the road, adding a section for notes from Sunday's that can be filled in as well as video content.
Account & Notifications
A user can easily access their account setting and manage their notification settings from the profile page. We wanted to make sure users could stay informed and updated as easy as possible, since communication had been a mixed bag in the past.
Users can select to be notified when certain pieces of content are added or if one of the events they have favorited ever changes so that they are current the moment something happens.
Keep What's Relevant
Any content, whether that's articles or a Sunday service, a users wants to come back to later can be favorited and it will be added to the Favorites section in their profile.
If a user is currently signed up with a group, our Community Lead will assign them to that group in the app. This gives them access to any content specific to their group, which is accessible via My Group in their profile and is managed by the Community Team.
Testing
Sitting down with key users and testing our app with them, we gathered valuable feedback about our product. Users loved the ability to save the content that matter most to them. A frequent request was to integrate Sunday Notes that could be filled in from the app, a feature that was already on our future roadmap.
Other things that were mentioned included a some kind of built in contact/question section, links to Sunday videos, and a way to sign up to serve.
How I Would Iterate From Here
Developing an app from the ground up with limited resources was a stretching endeavor. The most challenging part of designing this product was keeping it as simple as possible, which required me to keep in constant communication with our developers over what was possible and what we needed to shelve for the future.
We landed on the aim of "content is king", setting out to provide resources and information in a clear package. The biggest issue we saw coming down the road was continual development, since our resources were so thin and we had no dedicated engineer on staff.
I gained a lot of experience collaborating as a team and leading people to play to their strengths. Some things went great and other dynamics were challenging. Overall it was an invaluable experience that has only helped me grow as a designer, collaborator and leader.