How it works: Bonbids users raise money for causes by bidding on items they like to try win and them. Each bid is worth $1.00 and they can choose from prizes like gift cards, spa vouchers, popular electronic devices and so on. The catch is, they might be outbid by their friends, who also want to support causes and win items, so users would have to continue bidding until time runs out.

Competitive analysis: The Bonbids experience can be broken up into (1) fundraising/deals, (2) gaming and (3) social engagement. I looked into products and services with well-designed experience so I could gain insight on how to make it work and find inspiration for the Bonbids redesign.

In order to in/validate our assumptions and Monique’s vision, Will and I, as the team’s UX researchers, interviewed a few people that fit into these user groups to understand why they do what they do and how this service would fit into the context of their lives. We also tested the current site to look for their triggers and to identifying their exact points of frustration in the website’s flow.

We also asked them to complete specific tasks on the website to find the usability hiccups. They were to (1) create an account, (2) look for an item they like and try to bid on it and (3) outbid a competitor who is also trying to win that item. Here’s the feedback:

After reviewing our findings from the interviews and tests, we gathered together in one room and organized the feedback by common themes through affinity mapping. We grouped them based on categories of pain points and overall confusion and then, rearranged them based on areas of opportunity.

Creating personas and validating with surveys: Based on our affinity mapping, we created an initial persona of Gary, our deal seeker who likes supporting Kickstarters and other causes but expects things in return. His main goal is to spend less money for items that he wants (even if it means going through the extra hassle of bidding) and knowing that the money going to a good cause is a nice added bonus.

Although we were confident in this persona, we still wanted to explore the other set of users who are passionate about supporting causes. As we continued to do more user interviews, we also conducted a survey so that we have a broad understanding of people who support causes. We learned that everyone donates for the gratification aspect and that receiving items is a nice addition.

Based on the information we got from our surveys, we revised our persona to better match the Bonbids user to Helen, the passive donator, who is all about supporting causes through donations because she doesn’t necessarily have the time to volunteer. She is all about putting in minimal effort while maximizing her support to causes.

Let’s get this streamlined: Users were the most confused about landing on an auction page without it showing any affiliation to a cause. To make this more obvious, we created a cause-driven flow. A typical user would enter the site through a social media link posted by an organization or a friend. When users click on that link, they are directed to a cause page.

Victoria, Elexa, Will, and I designed separate user flows before meeting together.  When we met, we reviewed what we like about each. We evaluated the strengths and weaknesses of each other’s designs and then weaved that together into one streamlined powerhouse flow that addresses the most pressing issues. Mine focused on making the payment process while someone else had a great “create an account” experience.

We simplified and digitized the end-to-end user flow into this simpler path. This new flow puts the user’s cause of choice at the forefront and removes a lot of features that add confusion, frustration and clutter rather than value to the overall game.

Wireframing: We translated our completed user flow into a rough, low-fidelity wireframe so that we can understand how our redesign would look visually. In the span of 30 minutes, we sketched our own ideas in silence. Through rapid sketching, we delved into the details that could make or break the UX. We were intentional about creating delightful moments for users such as implementing a much simpler login process and providing them with confirmation for assurance.

Uh oh, we failed. In our initial redesign, we slightly changed the rules of the game so that it became a raffle rather than following a penny auction model. Unfortunately, an issue came up and the flow completely failed. Before prototyping, we had a team meeting with Monique to propose our ideas and get her feedback so far. She said that a raffle is a random process, as opposed to a “skill-based” activity. Therefore, it is not a legal way to directly charge customers and for Bonbids to be considered a legal social business.

What did I learn? Learning this was an eye-opener and validated the importance of keeping the lines of communication with the client open. I’m glad we had this discussion with Monique relatively early in the process before we invested any more time into this idea. For future reference, I plan to run through my ideas with clients and seek legal advice regarding potential challenges I may deal with.

Many designers emphasize the value of bringing in non-designer perspectives throughout the process, and not just towards the end when a high-fidelity prototype is built. This incident helped me understand why and gave me the conviction that I’ll never make this mistake again. If I do, I have to take the responsibility.

Can we collaborate on individual prototypes? Our initial approach was to individually work on different screens in Sketch and bring them all together into InVision as one prototype. This collaboration approach worked when we created the first redesigned flow so we naively assumed that it would be more effective and efficient to do the same in Sketch.

The answer is no. We failed again. Unfortunately, this strategy presented several challenges. We were all at different levels of the Sketch program and we all had different interpretations of the flow in the UI sense. As a result, these different screens gave us a lot of visual and conceptual inconsistencies. With limited time, we resorted to using our combined screens and Victoria and Elexa created a rough prototype together in InVision to test with users.

We conducted both remote testing with UserTesting as well as a couple others in-person, interview-style tests. It’s important to test a prototype effectively so I referred to this video on how to conduct user interviews with Michael Margolis, UX research partner at GV (his Medium page is also a phenomenal resource for UX research). Even as UX designers, we have tendencies to overlook the obvious so these tests allowed us to get feedback on how we can incorporate even better features to provide our users with truly magical moments.

Some of that feedback includes:

After receiving crucial feedback on our initial prototype from users, along with comments from the client and our mentors, we focused on the most important changes we can incorporate to produce a final, high fidelity prototype. After we failed with the “separate screens, one prototype” strategy, Victoria and Elexa took the responsibility to build the final prototype, while Will and I reviewed the artifacts from this project to prepare a presentation to the client.

Given the technical and time constraints, we couldn’t solve every problem that we discovered so we focused on the most needed features to build a minimal viable product to deliver to our client. Base on the feedback, we incorporated the following changes:

• Allow users to check out with an Amazon account so they wouldn’t have to manually enter their payment information. This also allows users to bid as guests, rather than asking them to create another account with a service they won’t use on a regular basis.
• A welcoming splash page for first-time users and notify them that 90% of the funds raised go directly to the cause. Users wanted more transparency about the business model and we wanted to be as upfront about it as possible.
• Increased, but not obnoxious, opportunities to share on social media. Monique stressed the importance of this because social sharing is how Bonbids grows.
• More notifications on the status of items that users bid on, especially in real-time. Users want to be able to monitor the game and know immediately if they have been outbid.

Let the users do the talking! Our final prototype was received with an overwhelming amount of positive feedback. Of course, they also had critiques to share, which we definitely welcome, but there was a quantifiable difference in the level of frustration that they experienced while using the site.

• “I like this! If it’s true, for each charity, they should announce how much of the money goes toward what they say they are supporting. I think that’s important.”
• With the share prize being clear and upfront, it motivated more than 50% of our users to share their activity from Bonbids on social media.
• “You can do one-step registration by paying with PayPal or Amazon, which is cool.”
• “The layout is simple, it’s easy to follow, it flows well.”
• Almost everyone reacted with delight when they saw the upfront disclosure saying things like “I like this” and “Wow!”
• Every single user tried to explore more items from the cause page.
• One user bid on an item, won and then donated the remaining 29 to her cause! That’s dedicated generosity right there.

Finally, and most importantly, our client was very excited about the final prototype we put together. She liked how the website is more transparent about where the money goes and how the flow was simpler and more streamlined.

There are plenty of things that could be done to further improve the Bonbids experience. Some of the ways we could extend and expand on this project are the following:

• Iterate on the existing prototype and get nitty gritty about the visual appearance and focus on the messaging, informational architecture and overall content strategy.
• Further research should be performed to improve the experience for the merchants and organizations hosting fundraisers.
• Look into redesigning the gaming experience and figuring out ways we could make the site more addicting to get users hooked on the service.
• Set up a system for weekly newsletters via email to go out so it triggers our users to return to the site.
• Increase transparency about where the money is going and how exactly it is being used.
• A striking value proposition landing page.
• Set up fundraising campaigns and promotions around popular holidays and globally-recognized movements.

And so on. This project presented challenges but being able to hone in on one part of the experience and prioritize that for users made the experience worthwhile.

As a group, we unanimously agreed that the design process involves a lot more work than anticipated. Despite that, we were all feeling incredibly passionate about improving our own skill set so that when we work on our next project, we can design even better solutions. Here are some of our reflections:

1. Roadblocks are a sign of innovation
The design process is full of challenges and roadblocks and it’s tempting to call it quits when it’s not working out the way we want it to. These difficulties, however, allowed us to expand our capacities as designers and forced us to be innovative with our solutions. And the moment we started approaching our roadblocks as manifestations of innovations changed our approach to design.

2. Drive design decisions with data
In user experience, it’s all about performing research and using that to drive every decision we made to take the project forward. When we prepared a presentation of our progress to the client, we made sure that we can confidently back up every decision we made with concrete data that we derived from our research.

3. A lot of research is required
During the research phase, I was taken back to my undergraduate days when I was researching for my senior thesis project. My professors and classmates would often talk about how only about 10% of the research gets cited in the final project. The same can be said about our prototype. This is not because the research was a waste but because it was necessary to build a foundation of knowledge.

4. Have an entrepreneurial mindset
Designing user experiences involve making more business decisions than we thought. Our final solution would need to drive user engagement to drive profits for the business, all while staying within legal limitations. Being entrepreneur-minded helped us make design decisions that were meaningful and ultimately contributed back to the growth of the business involved.

5. Be fearless about failure
There were moments when we’d get caught up in the design process and fixate on doing it “correctly.” We realized that, first of all, there isn’t a correct way but rather what we believe is the most tailored approach to the design challenge. Second of all, we wanted to be flexible about making mistakes, especially early on so that our final product would be significantly better than anticipated.

What do you see as the biggest opportunity of improvement for Bonbids? What would you have done differently than our process and how/why? Thank you so much for reading! If you have any questions, comments and/or feedback, I’d love them.