Hard Pivot Exploration
ICITIZEN/GENEROUS
Before joining, iCitizen was a solution to help citizens to connect with elected representatives, organizations, & overall civil engagement. The level of engagement was really low and did not provide the results they were initially hoping.
The company decided to make a hard pivot, practically dismembering the company and starting over with a small team of talent. The company reached out to me to help build out the experience that will provide results.
Task
Product Strategy
Team Management
Problem discovery
Research
Interviews
Journey Mapping
Visual Design
Interaction Design
Problem
This situation was an unusual one, but also similar to refocusing a product. The problem was that there was no clear problem. It was our goal to identify that through the market, stakeholder & user research.
Objectives
After deconstructing iCitizen's solution, it came to making citizens more civically engaged. With that base understanding of the problem, the objective was to discover paint points within civic engagement. After understanding the pain points we can test our assumptions.
Thematic Analysis
The best way for us to start this project is to get alignment on what assumptions we have, a problem statement, and monetization opportunities. With all that information, it’s best to put together an analysis of all the data, which will help us turn words into problems, then eventually solutions.
What We Heard
Some of the common patterns we heard from stakeholders, end-users & organizations were volunteering and the impact it felt it didn't have. With that, the time to utility ratio was off on all three groups. Lastly, discovering ways to be engaged in the community was often hard to find, especially for users who were specific to their interests.
Proto-Personas
Citizen
People who want to participate.
People who participate, but want more impact
Nonprofit
Organizations who are looking for gift opportunities
Organizations that would like to be discovered
Bank
Banks that would like to have healthy PR campaigns
When you feel like you're doing something or making a difference it creates a feeling of progress.
Landon Fishburne, Citizen
We could always use more (Volunteers). It requires a lot of manpower. In short, too few. We don't make space with volunteers to well
TIRRC, Organization
Rapid Prototyping A
Once all the research was done, and we had relatively confident assumptions, we quickly put together a prototype. Solution A was focused on building a platform that focused on experiences to get people to donate their time. The goal was to build such an experience that allowed the nonprofit to retain the citizen in order to receive gifts. Citizen feels like they accomplished something, nonprofits get funded to do what they do best.
Our Findings
Attendance was low
The participants felt little to no impact
Nonprofits appreciate volunteers, but end of the day it’s about donations
Rapid Prototype B
iCitizens main goal was to get more people civically engaged by building more impact in their community. So we went back to the drawing board to focus on gift giving (Donations).
Focus on Scale
Once exploring some solutions for a donation platform, we wanted to start with something we could scale. Which brought us to a mobile experience for donation with partnerships with local banks. The tool focused primarily on donations and the ability to double impact by having a local bank match said donation.
Interest based donations
Focusing on our users' interests will allow us to build a profile on the user. Thus giving us a base of information on what they would like to donate in the future.
The Brand
After having a good understanding of where we wanted to solve this problem we needed to rebrand the company. There was a lot of emotional debt with iCitizen, for users and stakeholders. We decided to make a playoff of the matching mechanic with donations. This brought us to a half-filled heart.
In Conclusion
It was very helpful to create rapid prototypes to get quick feedback on our hypothesis and allowed us to make essential pivots early in the process. User feedback was valuable and aligned with our assumptions for V1 of our product. Based on the very little data we had initially, it was up to us to gather data quickly with products people could use, knowing we would update it shortly after.