The Need
I joined the team as one of its early first stage members with a Founder, Cofounder, CTO, product manager, front-end and back-end developer. We essentially created the first version of our product to address the following need.
Non-profits account for 6% of US GDP ($1.1 trillion). Today, Greek Life Organizations (GLOs) and other Grassroots non-profits face too many tools, each with narrow functionality. Organizations cannot afford multiple SaaS subscriptions for each community member. Meanwhile, members who already dedicate their time and pay dues, are not willing to also pay for multiple SaaS subscriptions.
Project Details:
Team:
Founder, co-founder, product manager, Front-end & Back-end Developers
Timeline:
3 Months, weekly meetings with Founder, co-founder
Tools:
Figma
Founder, co-founder, product manager, Front-end & Back-end Developers
Timeline:
3 Months, weekly meetings with Founder, co-founder
Tools:
Figma
The Solution
Crowded application will help organization and frats specifically to manage their members interaction with each other and with the organization making each interaction simple and easy to manage while keeping their information secure and private.
Crowded aggregates and enhances digital tools to meet the unique needs of GLOs. Our Community as a Service concept enables organizations and their members to chat, pay, network, and mobilize in a one-stop-shop platform. Through digital aggregation more dollars donated can go towards causes rather than pricey SaaS subscriptions.
Crowded incentivizes members through a gamified platform which balances Greek Life’s pervasive exclusivity, with the power of their wider network. By digitizing their crowds, GLOs will run more efficiently leading new recruits, seasoned members, and alumni to see meaningful results from remaining active.
Process
Market Research
Define
After interviewing and speaking with 20+ students about who they are, where they come from, what the needs of their GLO are I was able to develop Jacob - a mock target user. I also considered the user goals and pain points that I collected from my teams research. The Crowded application needs to include familiar features from the other messaging applications that the students currently use so that there is not too much new learning that needs to happen.
Jacob
Jacob is a Junior in New York University and is studying economy. He likes to meet new people and hang out with his friends. Jacob is part of the fraternity Alpha Epsilon Pi. He owns an iPhone like most of his friends and uses iMessage as well as Group Me to message both his friends and Brothers in his fraternity. He explains that there is a lot of communication and coordination that is required to be part of Greek Life and sometimes it can become a hassle. But he loves the sense of brotherhood that AEPi offers. Jacob volunteers through is fraternity by organizing food drives for the underserved in his community.
Ideate
Together with the product manager we created a product feature road map.
Design
Crowded branding clean, exclusive, and trendy. The brand goal is to make users feel part of an organized community and provide a sense of brotherhood. Each University has their own color scheme which is why there is a gold yellow mixed with a deep blue that is not found in the brand color palette.
Prototype
With mock-ups and a branded aesthetic, I developed a working, usable prototype. Below you can view the onboarding process, payment set up and the messaging platform.
Test
We ordered pizza and invited some fraternity students that were on a summer internship in Israel and asked them to test the prototypes.
Tasks
1. Signup
2. Send group message
3. Set up bank account and make payment
2. Send group message
3. Set up bank account and make payment
Insights
Overall the students really liked the application. They said it reminded them of iMessage which they are familiar with but gave them a personalized feel with the University colors and the custom navigation bar which allowed them to create polls as well as perform other unique fraternity actions like send payments etc. One of their biggest complaints which was not particularly of the Crowded app but iMessage in general was that someone asked who wanted to order or go out for pizza people liked the message but then did nothing to follow up.
Another consideration is that not all the Universities color schemes would assure text legibility on the message chat bubbles.
Iterate
From the above feedback I created an idea that each student thought was brilliant and said they were 100% likely to use this feature. Currently on iMessage you can only view who reacted to your comments but I added a new button that allows you to start a chat with the liked comments. Another feature that I would add to this is the ability to delete the group after a preset amount of time so that this way a student is not left with too many group chats to handle.
Summary:
One of my favorite parts of this project was having the students around at all times. Some of the students were doing internships with us, some were in the same co-working space and each student always had at least 3 or 4 friends that were willing to act as users.
Speaking to users is not something I always had the luxury of with other projects but I learned from here that it really helps the design process go much smoother and faster. There is less disagreement between team members because the user almost always knows what they need more than anyone else.
Unfortunately, this startup had to shutdown because there was a lack of funding. The team was advised to test smaller features of the app and collect more data to raise funding but the team went against that advice and sent out a full working prototype with multiple features and so a lot of the funding ran out before we were even able to complete a full design circle.
