Creating a streamlined process to help users populate their lists
My role: Product Design Lead (Mozilla: Pocket team).
Main contributions to this project: user journey storyboard, user testing, design, prototypes, stakeholder management.
Problem Statement
We launched the shared lists feature in Pocket web and after a few weeks of release we were seeing a concerning trend in which the majority of users had empty lists or lists with only one item.
In order to make sure items were added to the lists users have just created, my solution was to include the step of populating the list during the flow of creating it. This project was complex because there were multiple ways in which a list could be created. On top of that, we had plans to make them collaborative in the future, which added another layer of difficulty.
Process
To capture this complexity, I talked to different stakeholders to collect data points which informed the creation of a detailed user journey. I storyboarded the key moments of the user journey and layered the qualitative data we had on top of it (user requests from support, data from dogfooding, the vision stakeholders had mentioned in internal documents, data from PRD and others).
My goal was to keep the user experience front and center so we would focus on the way users felt during the experience and at the same time considering the company’s goals. This high level artifact helped to align stakeholders in a shared vision and also supported buy-in by grounding the user experience in both data and the features requested by the product manager.
Following that, I developed wireframes and collected feedback from multiple stakeholders, including engineers and the product manager.
I then ran the user testing sessions and analyzed the data with the product manager, we refined the ideas and I created the final high-fidelity mockups and prototypes.
Demo
Conclusion
While the project didn’t come to fruition, it provided me with many valuable lessons. The most significant insight is the immense value that user journey storyboards bring to complex projects.