A very very fast Lean UX

A challenge is approaching and it is the following: In times of pandemic, how could we promote the sense of belonging to the individual in the relationship with himself, with his spaces, with his relationships, with his community or directly with the planet?

The question was very general and looking for something concrete on which to base our proposal was quite complicated at first. Music, movies, TV shows were some of the first ideas that led my team to see what points we could touch to answer the challenge. What was clear to us from the very beginning was that nostalgia was going to be our winning horse. To be able to reconnect with ourselves, with our teenage selves, when everything was possible and there was only tomorrow to dream about.

With this in mind, it was clear to us that we wanted to create a feeling of belonging and connection both with ourselves and with others. How to do this? Through an infinite network of memories, where anyone can participate and leave their 'memory'. Maybe you remember the name of the program that was shown in the afternoon on La 2, but do you remember the name of the baker in your neighborhood? That's the kind of answer we wanted to give. From small to big. Something organic that the users themselves could interact with and make it grow. In addition to this crazy idea, the other goal was to find a commercial hook with an existing brand, but I'll tell you about that a little further down.

To tackle this crazy project we had as a basis the Lean UX philosophy. This was my first time facing this methodology and I must say that, despite the initial skepticism, it has left a good taste in my mouth. The 'fail fast and cheap' is something that is hard to internalize but when you put it to the test gives great results. In just a few days we already had a product that we liked and that we could show through a landing page, which was the MVP we were asked for this final project.

We followed a pretty clear path: a process of research and people before and one of design and development in Wordpress, afterwards. The team started with a phase of assumptions, where we shared ideas about what this product was going to be for us. We came up with very interesting and revealing ideas such as the following:

Nostalgia links us to ourselves and brings us to remember a part of us that we have forgotten.

Nostalgia connects us with someone or something.

A simple memory can lead us to connect with thousands of people we don't even know... And that generates a sense of belonging.

Nostalgia is psychologically positive. It helps us to overcome difficult times, to rediscover ourselves and to connect with others.

With this first phase completed, it was time to define problems that we saw currently existing in society and how we could address them through our product. On an individual level we identified quite a few, such as:

Loss of self

Discovering that it is never too late to be a part of something

Disconnection with your environment

Uncertainty about the future

After sharing these problems, we synthesized our ideas in the following template:

Our service/product creates a communication channel for users to connect with themselves and with other like-minded users.

We have found that people are lost in this changing world and this is making it increasingly difficult for them to regain their former selves and connect with themselves and others.

How could we improve access to lost memories of oneself so that users can feel more at ease with themselves and their environment?

With this part clear, it was time to make a definition of assumptions and a final selection of these:

I think our customers need to find themselves again and regain that feeling of belonging they had in the past or discover one they didn't know they had.

The risk of this business is that there are already other ways to do this, for example, search engines on the Internet.

We can solve these needs with a network of shared memories that bring users into a more positive emotional state.

We will be able to do this through a digital platform that is free of charge for these users.

Our initial customer is young-adults (20 to 40 years old).

We will solve this risk by eliminating distractions. Creating a network of concrete and linked memories, which would make the user not to lose focus of attention.

The main value our client wants to achieve is emotional peace of mind.

We will make money by giving people access to buy experiences, objects, subscriptions to platforms... In other words, to be able to get hold of those memories.

Who is the user? Adults from 20 years of age.

What problems does our product solve? The sense of belonging to oneself and to the community.

How and when is our product used? The product would be used on any platform (mobile, web, tablet) and they would use it whenever they want.

What does the user expect from our product? He expects to feel better about himself and connect with other people.

Through a prioritization matrix, we decided to keep the following assumptions as they were the most unknown and had the highest risks:

The risk of this business is that there are already other ways of doing the same thing, for example, search engines on the Internet.

What does the user expect from our product? They expect to feel better about themselves and connect with other people.

From these assumptions, we turn them into hypotheses to continue with this Lean UX process. These are:

Assumption: We will solve this risk by eliminating distractions. By creating a network of concrete and linked memories, which would make the user not to lose focus of attention.

We believe that non-relevant information makes the user lose focus.

We will know we have done it right when the user jumps from node to node without jumping to another path (Happy Path).

Assumption: What does the user expect from our product? He expects to feel better about himself and connect with other people.

We believe that the user recovers himself and recovers the sense of belonging through the reconnection with himself and discovering that he belongs, or belonged, to a large community where he is not alone.

We will know that we have done well if the interaction with the platform is total and durable over time.

At this point, we were about to finish this first phase of the project. We were now moving on to the definition of expected results. Thanks to all the previous definition of assumptions, problems and hypotheses, we were pretty sure about where we wanted to move to. In addition to this, we were also able to come up with some first KPIs for our product.

What is the expected outcome of the validation of the hypothesis? That users spend time on the platform, open memories/nodes and share/create other memories. All this will lead them to connection with themselves and others, reinforcing the feeling of belonging.

Can the results be broken down into smaller components? Yes.

User login and view.

Users validating memories.

Users recording/creating memories.

Can smaller components be translated into KPI (Key Performance Indicator)? Yes.

User logs in and views (Time spent and number of memories interacted with).

Users validating memories.

Users registering/creating memories

Number of users registering 3 memories per day per week.

Number of users validating 1 memory per day per week.

Number of validations performed by a user in one visit.

Number of validations a reminder receives per day per week.

Number of nodes opened by a user per visit.

Number of memories registered in total per day in a week.

Number of registrations made per day in a week.

Number of clicks a reminder receives per day per week.

Number of clicks a promoted memory receives in a day per week.

Time spent on a souvenir per daily visit.

Number of comments on a souvenir per day per week.

Number of votes received by a comment on a souvenir per day per week

Now it was time to imagine our users, together with their journey using our product, and put them together. These were the results:

Once we had defined our users and their journey, we knew which functionalities our product was going to incorporate. At the same time, we filtered them under the MoSCow philosophy. That's how they stayed:

We will create a repository of interconnected memories for Miguel to address his job uncertainty (MUST)

We will create a repository of interconnected memories for Alicia to remember her youth and help her interact with other people with a similar life to hers (MUST)

We will create a memory repository/database for Kike to dive into his life/interests/references to recover current illusions (MUST)

We create memories with links to promotions so that Miguel can consult the creative copywriting master he is looking for (SHOULD)

We will create a field to introduce new memories to make the platform grow and connect with other memories of more users (SHOULD)

We will create a network that links memories from different categories, fields of knowledge and times (MUST)

We will create an AI so that Alice can share a memory of her own and it will give her the format that other memories have on the platform (COULD)

We create a ranking of comments that, depending on the validation or recognition by other users, can become a memory (COULD)

We will create a voting system of memories so that each memory “occupies” a space within the group memories (COULD)

We will create a voting system of memories so that each memory “occupies” a space within the group memories (COULD)

We will create an advertising space for our users to see products/platforms/etc that may interest them based on their previous memories (WON'T)

We will create a space free of registrations so that users who only want to see and discover feel free to do so without previous registrations (COULD)

We will create a register for users who want to buy, enter memories or comment on them (SHOULD)

We will create a system of dynamic forms so that users can decide what to upload (photos, videos, text, links...) (SHOULD)

All this information now had to be translated into a clear and condensed value proposition. To do this we used a Lean Canvas where we could make clear and classified all the strengths that our product has.

Feeling of being uprooted (from oneself), due to this current world that changes so much continuously and without warning.

Feeling of isolation and not belonging to the community. In this post-confinement world and where teleworking is up to date, these feelings have grown even more.

Users do not have the possibility to jump from node to node (memory to memory) due to the large amount of unordered information that currently exists on the Internet. There is a lot of irrelevant information that makes us lose focus.

In the first phase, we will focus on customers between 20 and 40 years of age, as these are age segments that tend to be more nostalgic and more desirous (buying) than other age groups.

We offer a network of interconnected and shared memories that help the user connect with themselves and the community, fostering a sense of belonging.

Search and consultation of memories.

Creation of new memories in the platform, either by generating a memory from scratch or through comments.

Random discovery of hidden memories ('I didn't remember this', 'that's true, how cool was that'...)

Mobile App

Web App

Play Store / App Store

Social Networking

Pay per click

% of item sale

Advertiser pays for posting ad

Partnership with Wallapop, where users can promote their products in memories

Human Team (Designers, Programmers, Devops people, HR, Administration...)

Servers

Advertising/Marketing

Number of users registering 3 memories per day per week.

Number of users validating 1 memory per day per week.

Number of validations performed by a user in one visit.

Number of validations a reminder receives per day per week.

Number of nodes opened by a user per visit.

Number of memories registered in total per day in a week.

Number of registrations made per day in a week.

Number of clicks a reminder receives per day per week.

Number of clicks a promoted memory receives in a day per week.

Time spent on a souvenir per daily visit.

Number of comments on a souvenir per day per week.

Number of votes received by a comment on a souvenir per day per week

Unique and innovative solution today.

Organic growth thanks to the users who use it themselves.

Connecting with forgotten memories and discovering new foundations.

Promotes a sense of belonging

We want to solve the feeling of uprootedness that the individual has, both with himself and with the rest of society. In addition to this, the post-confinement world has made all these feelings even more accentuated.

In addition to this, social evolution in the last 10 years, due to technological development, has left individuals without clear references to face the future. This evolution has been enormous in comparison with the evolution of the last 100 years, where practically several generations have lived in the same conditions without very drastic changes.

At the first point of this final part of the Lean UX process, we decided to create hand-drawn sketches of how our users would interact with the product, based on the Journey we had created earlier.

Before we started to visually design our product, we wanted to give it a name, the choice was dyrio. The idea first came from the dyr (Do you remember) and we added the io later because we liked the way it looked.

With the name and moodboard already on track, it was time to get our hands on Figma and design our landing page where we would promote dyrio. Once we had the design clear, the tool to develop the design was Wordpress.

With hosting and a domain registered, we were now able to start setting up our Wordpress with the first version of dyrio. It was the first time that I faced Wordpress and the truth is that my opinion has lights and shadows: I come from front-end development and the truth is that it is easy to work with Wordpress when creating the view of the web, but in exchange it It makes it difficult to do things that are more precise and require more than just drag and drop. We use the Avada template and the Elementor plugin to put everything together, both of which are really beneficial if you don't know development. As a nice comment, I didn't particularly like Wordpress, but I find it super useful when you don't have development knowledge and you need to put together something fast and usable. Here the final result:

Before finishing, and as a last note, to closely follow everything the user does with our project, we integrated a marketing campaign with Mailchimp, analysis with Google Analytics and heat maps with Hotjar, all with the aim of continuing well. Close how users interact with the dyrio landing page. Thanks to this data we can follow the Lean Ux bases of failing quickly and cheaply and save costs to achieve added value in less time.

With this this great adventure ends. Thanks for stopping by and I hope you enjoyed the article!