Product and User Experience Design
Product and User Experience Design
Lift & Co. is a technology company which helps Canadians understand and make better-informed decisions around cannabis. Lift.co, one of the company’s core products, allows users to explore legal cannabis products and stores and earn rewards by reviewing them.
Lift & Co. is a technology company which helps Canadians make informed cannabis purchasing decisions. Lift.co allows users to explore legal cannabis products and stores and earn rewards by reviewing them.
Over the past 4 years, Lift.co has had an active and growing user base. Our audience of medicinal cannabis patients were eager users of the platform, with the motivation of discounted cannabis prices.
With legalization set for October 17th, a new audience would enter the market and we saw an opportunity to convert them into users and in-turn to grow our monthly review count.
We couldn’t have been more wrong.
During the following months of legalization the rate of our reviews took a drastic downturn.
We had lost a large number of our medicinal users due to the change in our rewards program in order to keep our business compliant with the Ontario Cannabis Act, and we also had no historical data about our coveted audience of recreational cannabis consumers.
After a couple of months of analysis, monitoring new user behaviours, and conducting rigorous interviews, our team was able to build personas and uncover a few key insights through their customer journeys:
Desperate Dave makes up 17% of our user base. He is 18-24, male and familiar with cannabis. His motivation for leaving reviews are discounts and free stuff.
He has most likely ended up on Lift.co by searching for a specific strain and converted once learning about the rewards program.
Desperate Daves redeem the most points per user and more inclined to leave reviews compared to other age groups, however they are the smallest population of users.
Passionate Pete makes up 41% of our user base. He is 25-34, familiar with cannabis and is motivated by building the cannabis community and being recognized for his efforts.
He has most likely ended up on Lift.co by searching for a specific strain and converted upon discovering an opportunity to share his experiences with cannabis.
Passionate Pete redeems the least points per user despite having written many reviews.
Based on our personas’ motivations we implemented a badging system to solve for both: Passionate Pete is able to visibly grow his status in the community and Desperate Dave gains point multipliers for each tier.
In addition to our badging system we also launched a referral program. The program awards $5 to both referrer and referee, satisfying both personas by allowing Passionate Pete to gain a larger reach with his reviews and for Desperate Dave to easily earn more points.
Below is a snippet of our test plan:
What are the goals of the usability test?
Find what users find useful, what features they could live without, pain-points and reasons for drop off. We need to establish SEQ and NPS scores to benchmark the usability of our key flows.
What specific questions will be answered?
Is our site easy to navigate?
How long does it take to complete specific tasks?
How easy or difficult is each task?
Tasks and scenarios
Establish Scenario: Imagine that you are a recreational cannabis user, unsure of what strain to buy, and from what brand.
Create an account and fill out your profile.
Get a strain recommendation, then find it's positive effects. Talk us through your findings and whether or not you find the information displayed useful in making a purchasing decision.
Did you get enough information to make a decision? How would you proceed in real life: what would you do next? Don’t forget to talk us through your thoughts/feelings, and what you think you would need to do next.
Assume you have purchased your strain recommendation. Leave a complete product review.
Find a reward available to you, and tell us how you would redeem it.
Through our focus groups and user testing we learned the biggest pain point was the complexity of our review form. What suited medicinal patient needs and motivations no longer applied to the average recreational consumer.
We conducted an audit and removed fields users were leaving incomplete, simplified inputs by removing scales from effects, and rewarded more points per review. What was a 10 minute process became a 30 second experience with double the reward.
In order to fuel even more reviews, we also needed to increase user registration. As Lift & Co. is a new company, we rely heavily on SEO to generate traffic. Our analysis of user behaviour revealed that our personas were landing on product specific pages, then bouncing once they found the information they were looking for.
As they were not exploring the site, our value proposition was hidden entirely. We mitigated this by adding CTAs for logged in and out states of our product pages, encouraging users to register or leave a review.
Our results were conversion increases of 20% and 52% within the first month, respectively.
These adjustments have increased our monthly reviews from 1.2k to 3.3k. We are continuing to make strides to match our peak of 5.3k as we monitor and adjust based off of user feedback and behaviour.