Localist is an app designed for people looking for things to do in their city.
While working on the Rogers Product Innovation team as the Senior Manager of User Experience, my responsibility was to identify underserved user segments and create new digital product concepts for those users. Through extensive user interviews and research sessions, our team was able to synthesize the data we obtained, and turn it into functioning prototypes that we could test with users to validate concepts to be added to Rogers digital product pipelines.
Our team used a modified version of Design Thinking that gave us the tools and framework to rapidly research, ideate, and test a prototype in order to arrive at a go or no-go decision as quickly as possible.
Creating a shortcut to learning without building and launching.
Learn - Gather and synthesize all information about a specific segment to elicit insights, faulty assumptions, behaviours and the big problem we could solve.
Ideate - Come up with ideas to solve the problem and turn them into a testable hypothesis.
Prototype - Rapidly build a testable, working prototype that includes the selected features from ideation.
Test - Establish a context that ensures the entire prototype is reviewed, providing detailed tasks to capture authentic reactions and feedback
Through our multiple interviews with our target user segment of "Starter Nesters" (young couples or singles starting out in their first home), we were able to create a comprehensive list of jobs, pains, and wants. We used that data to create our customer profile, which served as our strategy guide when ideating product ideas to serve these users.
Insight theme cards are a great way to summarize and highlight the most interesting, relevant, and actionable findings from user interviews and synthesis. Our insight theme cards for Starter Nesters looking for local things to do gave us an area of opportunity to focus on as we moved into our ideation phase, summarized by the How Might We statement:
How might we help people find and coordinate experiences that meet all their criteria?
I created a reusable structure for the ideation session, with a focus on quick sketching to give us multiple potential solution sketches from the team.
Once we had solution sketches ready, I set up a voting session to give the team an opportunity to review, discuss, and vote on the best features and solutions, ultimately landing on one final solution to move into the prototyping phase.
After sketching concepts and voting as a team on the most promising features and overall design, I created a functional prototype to test with users.
I designed a marketing page for Localist in order to gauge interest from our target segment of Starter Nesters. We sent the marketing page to over 100 potential users, and received a 43% conversion rate, indicating that there were a large percentage of our target segment who would be interested in using Localist.
