Greenpop: Case Study

Initial Research

We started off by researching the organization, similar events in South Africa, and the users further, including users who attended the Eden Festival of Action in previous years. To gain a deeper understanding of Greenpop's mission, vision, and culture, what it does, why and how it does, and who it works with, we did some initial research. We explored Greenpop's digital presence (website, LinkedIn, social channels), read online reviews by users and gathered responses, and took notes from the CEO of the organization in a Q&A session. This was important in terms of empathizing with the organization we are designing for and with the client to make sure their needs and goals were met.

Initial Research Paragraph Summary

Greenpop is a non-profit organization located in South Africa dedicated to rehabilitating the environment. Their vision is for people and nature to thrive together. And, their mission is simple: to plant trees and green communities. Through their various projects– forest restoration, urban greening, sustainable development and environmental art– Greenpop aims to protect and restore ecosystems while empowering and inspiring individuals to join alongside them in their efforts. The Eden Festival of Action is a 1 to 2 week long gathering where environmental stewards from all over come together to share in ecosystem rehabilitation and workshops from sustainability experts. The Eden Festival of Action is the culmination of Greenpop’s goal: connecting people to their planet.

Client Goals

1. To create a “hyper accessible” culture of tree-planting. 

2. To start a global, catalyst event that is hyper inclusive, including people of all ages and races and people who don't necessarily consider themselves as environmentalists.

3. To get active (not anxious) about the future of our planet.

4. To bring people from around the world, digitally and physically, through storytelling

Unmoderated Usability Testing

In order to better understand users and their pain points using the website, we conducted remote and in-person usability testing with 4 participants located in different places.  We asked the participants to complete the main task of navigating Greenpop’s website and finding information about the Eden Festival of Action, which had a separate website navigated from Greenpop’s original website. We realized that although all users were able to complete the open-ended task, their task completion time was long and they made a couple of errors during the process, indicating Greenpop's site navigation was not as effective and easy to understand. We observed users and took notes as they interacted with and navigated through the websites. We made sure to include their frustrations, confusion and annoyance at different steps and asked follow-up questions to understand what they expect and do not expect in order to identify opportunities for design.

Questionnaire

In order to gather more qualitative data, we further created a questionnaire in Google Forms and delivered it to participants who already interacted with or would have newly interacted with the product. We had 3 male and 4 female participants of different backgrounds, and of a range of ages between 16 and 25, whom we recruited through convenience sampling. We included System Usability Scale (SUS) questions due to their simplicity and reliability. We included a mix of closed-ended and open-ended questions. Closed-ended questions were mostly related to navigation and finding relevant information while open-ended questions were about the user's experience, thoughts, and feelings, which also asked for additional feedback about both websites. We placed more emphasis on questions relevant to the festival's website itself.

Quantitative Data

• Task success: 100% for the usability testing

• Task errors: Varied (e.g., 4-9 errors)

• Task times: Ranged from 1:53 to 3:54 minutes

• Overall website rating: Average 6/10

User Personas & User Journeys

After acquiring all the responses to our questionnaire, we held a remote collaborative session to analyze the product from the user’s perspective, identify recurring themes and pinpoint the frustrations and needs of the user. We then translated our insights and assumptions to a user persona to represent young adults who may engage with the Eden Festival Website and mapped out a user journey to form a good basis for our potential design solutions. If we had more time and did not have a simultaneous hypothetical design project about a food delivery app, we would have created more than one persona and user journey and potentially analyzed the data in more depth and breadth, however, we had to take quick actions and make quick decisions.

Qualitative Data:

• Positives: Attractive design elements (e.g., color scheme, visuals).

• Negatives: Poor navigation, excessive information, and complex pathways.

• Suggestions: Simplify navigation, reduce unnecessary elements, and improve layout for ease of use.

HEART Framework:

Defining Success Metrics and Signals  

In order to define a shared understanding of what success looks like as a team, we made use of the HEART framework to define user-centered metrics (happiness, engagement, adoption, retention, and task success) which allow measuring the user experience on a large scale and further influence our design decisions. We made sure to identify desired behavior that can be measured. For example, the remote usability testing we previously did helped us to measure task success of finding relevant information and signing up to the Eden Festival of Action.

Stage 3: Ideate

Solution Sketching & Affinity Mapping

After gatherings insights and identifying what needs to change, we each created some quick concept sketches to illustrate our ideas and address some of the pain points.  We then evaluated our ideas and decided on to proceed further with the most feasible and valuable ones for the visual design. We categorized and grouped our ideas with the thematically organized affinity map and incorporated further design-related descision to resolve problems as key action items.

Pain points of users included having too much text not having enough contrast between text and background, not having a clear call to action in the ‘enquire now’ button as well as having the video play as soon as the users enter the site page, so they have to scroll down, find out where the audio is coming from, and then pause the video, which often causes annoyance. Users also found it hard to recognize which information was most important to know. And, they also weren’t exactly sure what to do when they reached this point on the home page because of the lack of structure and excessive copy.

So, in order to improve this user experience we created this mock-up to address the issues users had. We first adjusted the text in the box so that there wasn’t an overwhelming amount of information for the user. However, if they wish to learn more they can easily press the button and get redirected to a learn more tab. Likewise, the video would play only when the user wished to play it. Our mock-up also incorporated visual hierarchy, displaying the most important information at the top in a simpler and easy to digest way. We also made sure to echo the company's mission in “Getting active, not anxious”, and include a clear call to action in the “Join Us” button.

About Donations

The Eden website did not have a donation section, only a contact section. Users did not tend to associate the Contact Us page as a subscriber to the newsletter (which is not on this page) or following other social media platforms. We understood that donations were specifically made through the Greenpop website, however, when we conducted our interviews, we specifically targeted internationals. We found that many of them were interested in getting involved, but physically going to South Africa was either not possible due to the pandemic, too far, or too expensive. So, to resolve these pain points, we created a mockup that continues with the home page screen. When a user scrolls down the home page, there is a section that shows the recent Instagram page and recent posts and events. We also provided a section where users can click a button and have an option to donate.

Getting Involved

Continuing the homepage screen, we also added a portion that allows for users to know other social media channels. After speaking to the digital marketing team, we understand that TikTok is one platform you may potentially expand to, which we why we also mentioned in it this mockup. At the end, we added a subscribe to your newsletter section so users can immediately sign up if interested. We believe that providing other methods to get involved would directly align with your goals of having the Festival be hyper-accessible and inclusive as well. 

And there is an opportunity to create a design that only needs to grab the users’ attention once, instead of appearing on every page.

So we came up with the following solution. 

1. Having the logo at the top of the pop up gives the user context straight away, so they know exactly what they would be signing up for if they wanted to sign up for the newsletter 

2. We also incorporated branding colors to create a visual hierarchy and make sure key information stands out, and to maintain cohesion with the website itself

3. To maintain this narrative of inclusivity, we decided to headline the pop-up with the phrase ‘stay in the loop’ to immediately make the user feel as though they are part of this community. 

4. We also integrated clickable links to Eden Festival or Greenpop’s social media channels at the bottom so those who do not want to sign up for the newsletter can still engage through their other preferred channels