Shopping Experience Redesign | Mobile App

Gardyn went to market in March 2020 and experienced a rapid rise in demand and popularity. Using innovative hybriponicTM technology, a patented blend of hydroponic and aeroponic farming, Gardyn is setting a new standard for at-home technology that requires 95% less water than traditional methods.

Prototypes

Initiative Background

My Role

As a company, Gardyn's major source of revenue is linked to Gardyn membership sales. In other words, the company has a subscription-based business model. Gardyn Home system can be connected to a Wi-Fi network via Gardyn mobile app to allow users to shop for new plants, control their device remotely, customize water and light schedules, and look up information about the plants they are growing. Gardyn members also receive helpful tips & tricks to grow successfully from an AI-based assistant Kelby.

End-of-year marketing survey results shed light on areas of improvement when it comes to membership benefits that have a direct impact on the shopping experience in the app. One of the biggest membership perks is 10 monthly pods containing plant seeds and once-a-month free shipping. Initial research has shown that Gardyn members found getting 10 monthly pods overwhelming and felt pressure to place orders for 10 new pods every month provided they can grow only 30 plants at max at the same time. Gardyn members feared losing money if they do not shop every month in the app. Besides, long-term membership renewal rate was so low that it became crystal clear members were frustrated about their current membership experience. All these research findings brought Marketing, Product and Tech teams together to define the problem in more detail and come up with an action plan to solve the user and business problem.

Product Manager
UX Designer

The Challenge

How might we improve membership-related KPIs while balancing the user need for a more flexible membership experience without sacrificing the business goal of making more profit from membership sales?

Gardyn members get 10 monthly yCubes and are overwhelmed with this quantity

Cherry tomato yCube made of biodegradable plastic with nested rock wool

3 yCubes with planted seeds

Gardyn members get 10 monthly yCubes and are overwhelmed with this quantity

1/3

Action items to improve membership-related KPIs:

increase long-term membership retention rate from 23.4% to 50% in 12 months
increase membership satisfaction rate from 3.9/5 to 4.5/5 in 12 months
reduce the number of orders per month per member from 0.9 orders per member to 0.5 orders per member in 12 months
save company's money spent on shipping
increase overall membership value
increase membership conversion rate for non-members from 19.8% to 35% in 12 months

Constraints

Because of a lack of engineering resources and technological debt, we had to split the initiative into 2 phases to be able to incrementally implement the solution. The timeline for phase one was 4 sprints - 2 months worth of work from research to the first feature shipping. The timeline for phase two was 2 sprints worth of 1 month of dev support and the launch of other features.

WHO ARE END USERS?

Before crafting a research plan, I scheduled a stakeholder workshop to brainstorm around the problem space as a team and come up with hypotheses that would need to be validated with users regarding their purchasing behaviors.

The data I got exposed to at the workshop helped me craft a research plan that would later serve as a good reference point to what're are trying to solve, who we’re trying to solve it for, and why we are doing it.

User Segments

Since both members and non-members were affected by the problem, we had to better understand their current purchasing behaviors and user needs when designing a solution that could address their frustrations.

Order history analysis and plant sales analysis performed by our Data Analyst and a dozen of user interviews I conducted with members and non-members helped me learn more about Gardyn users.

Meet primary user persona - Gardyn member

Meet secondary user persona - Non-member

After developing 2 user personas of the Gardyn app, I wanted to present them to the Customer Support team and learn about what they think customers are struggling with the most when it comes to their membership experience.

Key takeaways after syncing with Customer Support on user personas:

¼ of Customer Support tickets volume was related to yCube refunds because of germination issues in winter/ early spring. Customers reached out to Support in order to get a refund for every ungerminated yCube. The Supply team did a lot of testing to figure out if it’s a seed quality issue, it turned out it was not poor quality. Rather, due to cooler temperatures and dryer environmental indoor conditions caused by A/C it took longer for plants to sprout. A lot of customers fairly thought it’s a QA-related problem and demanded a refund. Nature happens! The way Support resolved the issue made the business lose money, because they would just give a free month of membership to that customer or issue coupon codes depending on how bad the situation was. This was a big problem for Support in Q1-Q2 in 2021.

I later used these data points when iterating on a design solution for the web app used by the Support team and Plant Analysts to allow them to easily refund those unhappy customers without decreasing the value of membership.

More Hypotheses Validation

To validate what current users said and what app analytics revealed about their purchasing behavior, I decided to test the current shopping experience with 5 external users I recruited on userinterviews.com.

Below are the yCube Selections screen that users were generous about with their feedback.

WHAT ARE INDIRECT COMPARATORS DOING?

Comparator Research

Usability test results proved that there's a lot of design opportunities that can drastically improve usability of the product listing page in the Gardyn app. To get inspiration from the market of hydroponic devices, I analyzed competitor apps to see how their product listing pages looked. It turned out they sell plants on websites only. That's why I thought comparator app analysis would be a better idea to get a bigger picture of the e-commerce market trends. I did UX audit of the product listing pages of well-known e-commerce giants like Amazon, Walmart, Alibaba and eBay.

Omni-present UX elements in comparator apps:

Price is clearly displayed
Shipping cost is visible upfront
Estimated delivery time is shown
Product listing features a real picture of a product
Detailed product description

I used these features as e-commerce industry best practices later at the Feature Prioritization workshop that I set up to brainstorm about what design solutions can be quick wins both for the user and the business.

DESIGNING AND LEARNING FROM TESTING

Defining Problems

Armed with rich data about the needs, motivations and frustrations of 2 user segments - Gardyn members and Gardyn non-members, I outlined key problem areas that needed to be resolved.

Problem statements:

How might we improve the shopping experience for Gardyn members by removing psychological pressure from ordering 10 yCubes/month?
How might we communicate to members that they are special customers?
How might we communicate to both members and non-members the value/price of every plant and shipping rules in a clear way?
How might we communicate to non-members some key membership perks like 10 monthly plants and once-a-month free shipping?

Design Iterations

Having these HMW-statements and 2 user personas in mind, I started brainstorming around possible design solutions. As a sole UX Designer in the company, I felt the urge to invite more people to my brainstorming session to ideate together. The Facebook Community Manager and Marketing Retention Manager shared a lot of great insights about different marketing retention strategies with me. We did Crazy 8s and came up with a few membership modifications that could be a game changer for our users and the business.

The biggest 'aha' moment was allowing Gardyn members to roll any unused yCubes to the next months. The important question that stayed unanswered was "How many unused yCubes would we allow members to roll out?" We brought this idea to CEO and he approved it saying it would be fine for the business to allow members to accumulate up to 30 yCubes, since any customer may grow 30 plants at the same time provided she/he owns one device. When I talked to the Supply team, they said some of the plants like bare root strawberries and sunflowers are actually more expensive than others and the business is losing money by selling them cheap. I thought we might want to make these expensive plants available to members only to increase the value of membership and make members feel VIP by offering them something no one else has access to.

Remembering how much users feel excited about new plants being added to plant portfolio every month, I believed it would make sense to advertise this event on the product listing page by labelling them as 'New' to entice users and boost sales.

One thing that remained unclear is how to display the plant price. The problem was that members do not pay anything when shopping for 10 plants every month, with extra plants costing $1.99 each with a member discount. Alternatively, non-members need to pay a full price of $4.99 and the shipping cost would be $9.99, with any number of plants in the cart. Keeping these constraints in mind, I started sketching out the interface of the product listing page.

Early Testing

Learning from what Gardyn members said:

I recruited 6 current Gardyn members to test out the new layout of the product listing page and get feedback on the credit system, member exclusive plants, variable credit value for new plant varieties. Below are mid-fidelity wireframes that were tested out with 6 Gardyn members.

Learning from what Gardyn non-members said:

These 6 usability tests with Gardyn members uncovered a whole bunch of usability issues that I addressed in the second iteration when testing the same product listing page with 6 Gardyn non-members who experienced germination issues with their plants in the past to better understand if they would be willing to receive credits for ungerminated plants instead of a coupon code that can only be redeemed on the website. To my surprise, non-members they shared their bad experience with coupon codes and said that a credit redeemable in the app would be a big deal for them. This insight led to a decision to allow Customer Support agents to issue germination courtesy credits to unhappy customers. Those credits would show up on the product listing page. Non-members would only need to pay for shipping. Below are mid-fidelity wireframes that were tested out with 6 Gardyn non-members.

Moving to High Fidelity

Recapping on the design decisions I made:

Credit system allowing members to accumulate up to 30 credits (10 monthly credits instead of 10 monthly yCube).
Making the shipping price and the price of extra yCubes explicit on the product page rather than in the cart.
Communicating to non-members the real price of every plant and up-selling the credit system by explaining plant value in credits next to the plant price to educate about this membership perk.
Canceled, paused, expired users have 90 days to redeem any unused credits by reactivating their membership plan
New yCube Selection Screen Layout to accommodate new features - variable credit value, 'New' label on recently released plants to delight and excite returning users, 'Members exclusive plants' to remind members how special they are.
How it Works screen that educated 2 user segments about this big membership modification.

PRODUCTION AND MULTIPLE FEATURE RELEASES

Timeline and Design Specs

As mentioned earlier, the initiative was split into 2 app releases. Initial research started in June 2021 and phase 1 was released in August 2021. Phase 2 was implemented in December 2021 after the tech team found enough resources to do it. I worked supporting Devs during design implementation for 2 phases. I wrote acceptance criteria that helped the Software Engineer in Test to test all the use cases. Also, Mobile App Developer invited me to the latest builds so that I could do a quick UI test every time something new was implemented before handing it off to formal QA.

Release plan for phase 1:

Credit system allowing members to accumulate up to 30 credits
Users have 90 days to redeem any unused credit with an active membership plan if their membership expire or is canceled upon request managed by Customer Support
'How it Works' screen explaining the terms & conditions of the new credit system

Release plan for phase 2:

Members exclusive plants
Variable credits - fertilizer and bare root plants would cost more than 1 credit
New plants added to plant portfolio would get tagged as ‘New’ via CMS by the Plants team
Shipping cost and yCubes price with a member discount are shown when a member runs out of yCubes in his/her account
Non-members get credits for every ungerminated yCubes within 28 days of the delivery date
Members exclusive plants are locked for non-members but there is a CTA leading to a Membership Selection screen to drive membership sales
Price shown with an equivalent of the credit value for non-members to lure them into a credit system and eventually encourage them to convert to membership

First Lessons Learned

Some user feedback after the launch of phase 1:

Users don’t have issues with shipping rules. They have not changed since the last design iteration. How it Works screen helps users understand how the credit system works.
There was a 3-hour time gap between when a notification alerting members about new credits being added to their account was sent and the actual time when a user saw those new credits added on the yCube Selection screen. I reported a bug myself 2 days after the release day. Fortunately, my personal membership anniversary date was close to the feature release date and I experienced this friction myself. It turned out highly difficult to fix the timing issue. A good lesson for the future would be to test those notifications more thoroughly, cause they are also a big part of the user experience.
Great reviews in Gardyn Facebook community. Gardyn members are happy about their unused monthly credits being rolled out to the next month.

How Users Benefitted

Members:

Less friction to order yCubes
Less frustration with remembering to order every month
Members should be able to order what they need when they need it
Higher satisfaction of membership

Non-Members:

New users who opt out of membership are now eligible to receive courtesy credits if any of their yCubes does not germinate within 28 days since placing them on the device
Non-members can make an informed decision before purchasing a plant cause they know how much they would need to pay upfront

Business Outcome

The number of orders per month per member decreased from 0.9 orders/member to 0.6 orders/member in 6 months which is very beneficial for the business
Business started saving around $27.800 monthly by shipping fewer packages in 6 months
Membership conversion rate for non-members increased from 19.8% to 26.2% in 6 months
Membership satisfaction rate has increased from 3.5/5 to 4.2/5 in 6 months.