Strategizing a new experience to grow the user base

Problem Space

Pride Places’ primary service is a digital directory that connects the Queer community to Queer-owned and friendly businesses to ensure a safe experience. However, it had limited success in engaging users and providing revenue so Pride Places was looking to develop a better business strategy that bridges the gap between Queer consumers and businesses that support them.

Results and Impact

Validated the core features for a new experience for the future of Pride Places that had high user interest, aligned with the company’s strategic vision and mission, and provided better opportunities to generate additional revenue.

Defining Goals and Priorities

We began by meeting with the stakeholders to determine how we should approach the new direction of Pride Places. It was critical that our user base and goal of serving the community stayed the same. Pride Places needed a strategy focused on steady and sustainable revenue growth.

“We don’t want to be known as the LGBTQ+ Yelp.“

-Founder

Issues with the Current Experience

With the current experience, we were dealing with a chicken and egg situation. We learned there was low engagement from community members and business owners, which meant user-generated content like ratings and reviews were low and businesses saw little incentive to purchase a plan to market their business on the site. Another team member had already conducted usability tests and iterated on the existing design so we knew there weren’t any usability issues.

Synthesizing Learnings from Discovery

It was clear that the stakeholders wanted to move away from just the online directory and go in another direction that better addressed the needs of the community. This meant our next steps were to determine if we should create a new feature for the directory or create a completely new experience and platform.

Primary Strategic Goals

Understanding the Current Space

Market Research

We started by conducting a comparative analysis with 10 comparators to identify opportunities and see if it was best to go in the direction of improving the current experience. We were primarily interested in learning how these other businesses keep up engagement and retention since that was the biggest problem with the current site. Our main takeaways were that businesses that had some sort of community or networking feature had higher user engagement and those that focused on a directory strategy had little to no engagement from customers outside of social media.

Trends

Empathizing with Users

User Interviews and Secondary Research

We looked into various Queer spaces on the internet and conducted 10 user interviews with those in the community to understand their experiences in various areas of life like the workplace, social media, finances, academics, and identity. We decided to focus more on the community rather than businesses because our primary goal was to best serve them. The biggest insights were that everyone’s experience in the queer space is very different so it was difficult to find information that was relevant and reliable. Additionally, meeting others with the same identity made people feel seen and heard.

Making Design Decisions

Since we did more exploratory research on a wide array of topics, we had to decide which pain point we should solve. Our research validated that the current experience was not addressing our users’ needs and after some ideation, we decided to create an entirely new platform to be the core product of Pride Places. Being part of a community was a big insight we heard about in the interviews so we determined that a directory was not the best solution and capitalizing on the business directory strategy would not be valuable.

Design Priorities

Evaluating a New Idea

Ideation

Based on our research, we conducted crazy 8s and workshops to ideate different concepts that addressed our design priorities. We wireframed 4 different concepts; a content hub that includes a variety of topics, a space for social media live streams and videos, a multimedia discussion board for news, and a virtual reality interactive community.

Concept A: Content Hub

Allows users to choose topics to follow and customize their newsfeed. Users can also browse a library of topics and follow others.

Concept B: Social Media Livestreams and Videos

Creators can create rooms based on a topic like career, finances, community, etc. Anyone will be able to record a video or audio to add to the discussion or just simply interact and learn from the content already there.

Concept C: Multimedia Discussion Board for News

A discussion board with threads organized by topic (Finance, Mental Health, Community, etc.). Influencer-created videos that highlight businesses, articles, and Queer news.

Concept D: Virtual Reality Online Community

This is a place where users can meet up virtually through the city center and attend various businesses and events based on their needs and learn about different resources and services while interacting with others.

Concept Testing

With our 4 concepts in mind, we conducted a concept test with 11 user interviews and 30 surveys. 2 concepts were randomly assigned to participants to gather qualitative and quantitative insights to determine how users get LGBTQIA2S+ related information, what platforms they use and prefer (mobile app vs web browser), what features they would most likely engage with, and compare how each concept meets their needs. Concept A, the content hub, had the highest average NPS rating but users were interested in certain features from the other concepts like live streams and written content, and the ability to interact with others in the community.

“It would be nice to be able to connect with other LGBTQIA+ folks who are my same age or share similar interests.” -Participant

Deciding the Future of Pride Places

Based on our findings from the concept test, we decided that the new experience for Pride Places would be a user-generated content (UGC) resource app that incorporated various forms of media and encouraged socialization and connection. We thought an app would best meet the needs of our users because we wanted to ensure it was an engaging and interactive experience that users wanted to keep coming back to. From there we developed product requirements and a roadmap for the experience to drive the next team in their user flow and wireframing phase for an MVP.

Content Hub
Organize a way to find and share resources and media.

Mixed Media
Customize and personalize the experience through videos, articles, filters, a newsfeed, and accessibility accommodations.

Socializing
Help people find their community through varying levels of participation.

A user-generated content (UGC) resource app that incorporated various forms of media and encouraged socialization and connection.

Challenges

The biggest challenge of this project was that it was very abstract and the company had no set process in place. This meant approaching the project with more of an exploratory lens to find what works and what doesn’t work. While we learned a lot of valuable insights about the Queer experience, I think our research scope and initial goal to serve these users in every aspect of their lives was much too broad. We asked participants about what it’s like to be queer in every aspect of their life from finances to health and wellness but I think it would have been more valuable to focus on one space and dig deeper. Another challenge was that we had a very limited budget so we had to find workarounds for the kinds of tools we used and how we recruited participants.

Impact

We were able to use our user findings to create a roadmap for Pride Places 3.0. The team is currently in the process of creating an MVP and doing usability tests based on our validated concept. With this project, I was able to focus more on the strategic side of the process and navigate an amorphous space and complex market. Even though we started with limited to no data and assumptions, we were able to challenge these assumptions and gather the insights we needed to design the foundation of a new experience for Pride Places.