BACK

THE CHALLENGE

Indiegogo is a crowdfunding site based on a marketplace model. Campaigners launch and manage campaigns to raise funds for their ideas and backers support these campaigns by making financial contributions in return for  “perks” or products that will eventually be shipped to them.

No easy way to collect location-based shipping fees
One of the challenges faced when offering perks on Indiegogo, was the inability to collect shipping fees and specifying different rates based on the different locations of domestic and international backers. As a result of this limitation, campaigners would have to reach out to customers off-platform and request additional money for shipping fees or they would create separate perks on their campaign for the sole purpose of collecting additional shipping fees and instruct backers to select those perks based on their location.

Introducing shipping fees
Our goal was to build a better end-to-end experience that allowed Campaigners to create perks and easily specify the additional cost of shipping those perks to backers to any location. Backers would know which perks are available in their location, and would automatically be charged and informed of the cost of shipping during their checkout experience.

THE APPROACH

As Lead Product Designer I was responsible for every aspect of the design from start to finish. I mentored a junior product designer on my team and worked with the product manager and engineering team to develop a solution that would allow people a better way to collect shipping fees for their campaigns. The entire project duration was 2 months from design to deployment, where I lead the each of the following phases:

1. Research and Analysis

2. Ideation and Solution Design

3. Prototyping and Usability Studies

4. Solution Refinement and Visual Design

Developing a hypothesis
We began be forming a hypothesis of what users would need based on prior user research we had conducted as well as the direct feedback that our Customer Support team receives from active users. We understood that:

1. Campaigners should to be able to apply a set of shipping rates for multiple locations for each perk listed on their campaign.

2. Campaigners should be able to set a single rate for a large region such as “Worldwide” or “European Union”.

3. Campaigners should be able to add country-level exceptions that would override any regional rates.

Based on our hypothesis and scope, I led the design team in a quick ideation phase where we developed three possible interaction models that we felt were possible solves for the feature.

Solution design A
The first design proposal presented campaigners with a simple toggle to specify whether fulfilling the perk required shipping. If so, campaigners would be able to choose from a list of locations and set a price for any location.

As campaigners selected a location, the interface would enable the option to enter a price for the rest of the world. For example, a duffle bag might ship in the United States for $10, but $25 for any location outside the United States.

Solution design B
We explored a second interaction model that was slightly different, in that it asked the campaigner up front about whether they required shipping, only planned to ship to a select few locations, or intended to ship anywhere in the world. If the campaigner chose to ship to only a few locations, the interface allowed campaigners to specify as many locations as needed, but never a value for the "rest of the world".

In order to ship everywhere in the world, campaigners had to make the explicit decision up front, and then specify additional countries that might have different rates.

Solution design C
And finally, our third design was a hybrid solution that allowed campaigners by to specify multiple locations in addition to using an explicit row for anywhere else in the world by default. This interaction required campaigners to delete the "everywhere else in the world" row if they chose to ship to certain locations only.

Prototypes and in-person usability sessions
At Indiegogo, the design team consists of both product designs and user researchers who partner and collaborate to develop the overall research strategy, conduct usability sessions,  and synthesize key findings and insights to iterate and improve the product design.

For each of three design directions, we conducted in-person usability sessions with 14 research participants. We built hi-fidelity clickable prototypes that were designed to test the following three use cases.

1. Perk only ships in the United States.

2. Perks ships everywhere in the world, but at different shipping rates.

3. Perks ships everywhere in the world for the same flat rate.

THE INSIGHTS

Usability findings from round 1
Each of the initial designs supported one or two use cases, but none of the designs did well across all three use cases.