How to better crowdfund

Case study no. 4 at General Assembly

Brief create a crowdfunding website for scientists to:
- Engage scientists in creating profiles and content.
- Make the website a go-to place for scientific research.
- Help scientists in gaining more funds.

UX Team Ben, Timileyin, me
Duration 2 weeks

Research

To find out how other crowdfunding websites work, we’ve looked at Experiment/ JustGiving/ Patreon/ Kickstarter. Their strong points are: evident call to action, clear description of benefits of use, step by step guidance of user, highlighted topics and projects including a timeline layout. However, none of the above mentioned competitors has social features that would help support scientists and some have a mix of quality of projects.

With the help of Natalie, founder of Crowd.Science, we sent out a screener survey to crowdfunders who have already signed up to the website. As a result we learnt how they find scientists’ projects and what convinces them to offer support.

Furthermore, we conducted user interviews with crowdfunders as well as scientists to understand their current experience and to find potential pain points that we could challenge.

The key factor for Crowdfunders to support a project is a an engaging video. They also need to be able to trust the scientist before they choose to support him/her.

“I would like to know more about the person behind the campaign”- Jakub

Scientists struggle to find time to interact with the public. They lack of social media savvy but would like to connect and know more about their supporters.

“I’m really open to the idea of sharing my knowledge with the audience now.”- Eloise

Problem statement and hypothesis: Scientists are currently unsure of how to share their knowledge on the platform with the audience, which is leading to reduced engagement from crowdfunders. If Crowd.Science becomes a social platform with a regular audience then scientists will be more successful in raising money for their projects.

Personas

Based on the information gathered from our interviews we’ve created personas with corresponding scenarios to contextualise the challenges:

Scenarios

1/ George is passionate about frog migration and would like to share his knowledge on this topic. 2/ Lara just bought a pet frog and she is interested to know more about frogs.

Key challenges

1/ Design a profile page for scientists that is simple to create and run and is engaging to the public. 2/ Design a category page that allows the public to find content that they’re interested in.

Design Studio

Our team facilitated a two-hour ideation session with Natalie and Alex from Crowd.Science and together we came up with the following features to improve the experience:

Profile Page: Step by step setting up of profile / Gamification / Connection to social media / Reminder to update profile.

Topic Page: Selective browsing of content / Tips to engage other than money / Ask a question / Categories to be selected as cards.

Prototype - usability testing and iterations

Having the above features in mind, we started sketching the first paper prototypes and as we were testing and iterating, the level of fidelity went up.

Creation of Profile

1. Sign Up

• Information on screen is overwhelming.
• We split it into two steps.
• Connect with Linkedin/ Twitter/ Google instead of Facebook?

2. Name & Photo

• Not sure what photo to add.
• We refined onboarding instructions.
• Further feedback to add examples of photos.

3. Research Areas

• Would like to select broad areas first and then add tags for specific areas.
• We incorporated a clear list of categories with option to add tags.
• Would like to see a back button.

4. Post

• Description that was supposed to appear on the about section but with an aim to familiarise the scientists with writing a post on their profile.
• This was confusing so we named it ‘About you’ instead.
• The big blank space to write scares the users off.

5. Teams

• Confusion whether it would be the lab team or everyone working in a specific area.
• We moved the options of adding a team to the profile page and instead integrated the connection to social accounts at this step.

Profile Page

• Button ‘Link to Project’ > We changed button into ‘Create Campaign’ as the campaign would be created from the profile page.
• Badges would stress the scientists rather than motivate them. > We removed them.
• Profile section takes too much space on the screen. > We condensed the section.

Category Page

• Background image is too big. > We removed the background image.
• What are ‘Tips’ and ‘Q&A’ filters? > Changed to Ask a scientist > FAQ.
• Projects filter made the users think they’re on the projects page. > Removed.
• Search bar and call to action to sign up to a personalised newsletter weren’t visible. > We moved the search bar to the top navigation bar and incorporated the newsletter in the footer of the page.

High-fidelity Prototype:

Click here to view the project `Crowd Science High-Fi`

Specifications:

Next steps:

• Further social features to create more ways for interaction.
• Mobile version design and test.
• New design for creation of campaign and crowdfunder profile.
• Categories representation and placement on screen based on statistics from user preference.

Personal Observations

• It was hard to divide the workload equally between us three, but in the end we got to a consensus. Communication is everything!
• We used Sketch to create the PDF version of the design specifications for the client and stakeholder. It so happened that they wanted to reuse the file and alter a few elements but were unfamiliar with the program. It had to be done through our team again. We could have avoided that if we used a more common program like Keynote.