about the company

Which? is the UK’s consumer champion. Their vision is to tackle consumer harm by making life simpler, fairer and safer for everyone by giving them trusted everyday advice when, where and how they need it.

my role

UX designer

challenge

Which? provided two separate apps - magazine and reviews. However, this limited their ability to give members a full native Which? experience beyond these offerings. In order to provide a more seamless and comprehensive experience for members, the mobile app squad was created to re-imagine and re-build the app space from the ground up.

goal

To re-design the Which? app by exploring new ways to expand its offerings beyond just magazine and reviews, providing a more habit-forming member experience on a single platform.

design process

To understand our users, including how they use our apps and what their pain points were, we first explored user profiling, existing app data and feedback. This helped us prioritise opportunities we wanted to explore against business priorities. I facilitated squad ideation sessions, converting our opportunities to HMW statements, then into concepts for user testing. Through several rounds of iterations, we finalised our MVP for release.

what do we already know?

We kicked off by looking at who our users were and the most common feedback trends of the existing apps, giving us a general picture of our target audience. We then delved deeper into the data to find drop-off points in user journeys to deduce pain points and compare this against existing research on buying behaviour. We themed and then prioritised key insights against business priorities for potential opportunities to tackle. These included initiatives such as improving app retention and overall app star rating.

ideation

As a squad, we converted our prioritised insight themes into HMW statements. This helped us re-frame problems into opportunities. The squad were given a task to find ideas from their favourite apps that could serve as inspiration for ideation. A Crazy 8s exercise was used to spark multiple ideas from each individual. Squad members were then tasked to develop their idea in a further session before the best ideas were dot voted.

idea to MVP

We took each HMW on an ideation-prototyping journey to land on our MVP. This included a further contextual research piece that provided qualitative data to further iterate on our concept.

Selecting topic interests

Allowing users to select topics that interested them, we could serve personalised content, increasing relevance and value of our content.

Compare products

Existing research told us that users like to compare products before making product decisions. This tool would increase engagement and value of the app.

Onward journeys

Providing onward journeys within and at the bottom of content would increase engagement and time spent on the app.

user research

The diagram below depicts our user testing cycle, which was carried out on a weekly basis. This allowed for rapid user testing of concepts and iterations post-analysis. We then conducted user tests with members to further contextualise our hypotheses.

Key findings

Out of the 7 concepts tested with users, 6 demonstrated that the intended features were findable and intuitive. However, primary research revealed that drastically changing the app from a reviews-focused experience to a browsing/content discovery experience could frustrate members and cause friction in their journeys. To avoid overwhelming members with drastic changes to their accustomed user journeys on the already new app, we decided to release these features in a phased approach.

post-launch analysis

After launching the redesigned app, we successfully increased retention by 28% and improved our star rating from 4.2 to 4.5 within the first week. We analysed app feedback post-launch and attributed our success to improved features such as the compare feature, magazine capability, and the new look and feel.

re-designing an outdated app from the ground up