TL;DR
Event organisers want to spend less time on admin and more time building relationships with their participants. With a tight deadline we were able to leverage our existing design system to build a brand new app for event organisers to make participant check-in easier, quicker and more reliable, freeing them up to build relationships.
My contribution
Product strategy
Product design
User research
Continuous discovery
Product vision
Workshops
Ways of working
The team
1 × Product Manager
1 × Product Designer
3 × Engineers
Impact
Coming soon
Overview
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Process
Understanding the customer
Working closely with my Product Manager; Ryan, we spent a lot of time speaking with event organisers and partner success managers at Let's Do This to understand not only the problems but the underlying motivations.
We kept hearing that organisers want to speed up average check-in time per participant. It would've been easy to leave it there, but digging a little more and asking "why" a lot, we discovered that the motivation is actually for organisers to spend more time with perticipants to give them a 10 star experience.
By learning this we would obviously look to make check-in faster, but also look for tangental opportunities to help enrich the relationship between the organiser and the participants.
At each of the events there could be up to 50,000 participants checking-in, as well as dozens of untrained volunteers arriving on the day to use the app for the first time. Our margin for error was zero. It had to work perfectly first time.
Reducing risk with an internal test
A little like Michael Jordan turning up on game day and taking his first ever jump shot, we couldn't arrive to the first public event without having tested it first. But how do you test a 50,000 participant event without actually testing an event? Our Product Manager; Ryan, had the amazing idea of us organising our own internal event within the company to test the end to end flow.
We sent everyone at Let's Do This an email with their booking confirmation, we recruited members of the team that were unfamiliar with what we were building to play the role of the volunteers, and then we just stood back and watched.
We learnt so much in those 30 minutes which challenged our assumptions of what was important, the hierarchy on the pages, the copy and even the flow itself.
We also bribed people with sweets which is a great tip.
Building for speed with reusable components
As mentioned earlier we had a tight deadline and needed to ship the app within a few months.
I knew the quickest way for us to achieve this would be to utilise the majority of our components from our in-production consumer app. Although I might've enjoyed designing everything from scratch, we saved weeks of front-end work by making use of our existing components.
First user experience
This is obviously crucial for any product, but for ours it was all we could think about. We knew we would have dozens of non-tech savvy volunteers arriving on race day, being handed a phone and being expected to then check-in thousands of cold participants.
We constantly mitigated this by thinking of ways to onboard new users effectively and brain stormed techniques to "show don't tell" our volunteers what to do.
With more time I would love to have explored this further but a small improvement we made following our internal user testing was that people don't read text… ever! So I worked with one of our brand designers and a motion designer to create a simple set of motion graphics to show the volunteer what to do next. This was consistently praised as a "wonderful touch" by several organisers and volunteers.
The solution
Offline mode from the beginning
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Scaleable and flexible
Action sheet that can be customised.
Flow can be reordered depending on requirements.
Brand theming
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Actual speed vs perceived speed
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Continuous iteration
Massive data on first download
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Roles
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Outcome
This piece of work was about building a user-centred cadence for the team, and shipping iterative improvements. Setting some foundations for the team to take further once I rolled off the project.
This work was carried out a few years ago so things have changed slightly since my time at Gousto, but some of the learnings and designs are still live in a slightly alternative design.
Additional opportunities
As part of our continuous discovery process we built conviction in a bunch of interesting jobs and opportunities but these were not implemented during my time at Gousto. I explored pairing these jobs with Trustpilot quotes that referenced the same outcome to add some social proof.
I envisioned a multi-variant test on the delivery slot step as this was at the beginning of the funnel so would give us a very clear signal.
Busy workers who want to save time
Families who want to make planning easier
Families who want to experiment more
