Community Gearbox
Alongside product designers Uyen Phan, Geena Yin, Michid Byambajav, project mentor Izabel Zheng
Jan - May 2023
OVERVIEW
During Spring 2023, I worked closely with a group of consultants and the founder of Community Gearbox, Dante Gracia, to envision what incentivizing features would look like on a non-profit app. Together we came up with innovative solutions that would make lending more gratifying and increase the network of gear available for borrowers.
As the ideation sprint lead, I prepared the team for high-fidelity prototyping by solidifying our design goals and choosing the MVP design.
THE FINAL DESIGNS
CONTEXT
What is Community Gearbox?
Community Gearbox is a platform where friends can lend and borrow items for free, hence building deeper connections, decreasing individual consumption, and creating an abundance of shared resources.
THE PROBLEM SCOPE
The idea itself is good, but it isn't desirable…
THE PROBLEM
So Dante asked us…
How might we design more collaborative features within Community Gearbox to make borrowing amongst a network of trusting people delightful and rewarding, so people lending items feel appreciated and compelled to share more?
Lending Habits + Altruism
A willingness to lend depends on familiarity, and lenders are motivated by the act of doing good to strengthen mutual respect and aid.
Borrowing Habits
Since the exchange process can be difficult, people borrow for convenience, temporary and inconsistent usage, and saving money.
Digital Features
People feel more connected to others in digital communities when there is more unfiltered and casual exchange of comments or content.
Gratuity
People love to feel appreciated for their contributions and value reciprocity through words of affirmation, IOUs, gifts, and being publicly acknowledged.
REFINING THE HMW
Lenders dictate the platforms' success…
Through learning about the motivations of lenders and borrowers, we realized that over 40% of survey participants borrow items more than once a week, but the problem lies with the lack of lenders. Without lenders, there is a lack of gear, and without gear, borrowers can’t “browse”. So instead of honing in on both user groups, we decided to focus on designing for lenders. We rephrased our research question to...
How might we design more incentivizing features within Community Gearbox to make lending to a network of trusting people more delightful and/or rewarding, and build accountability that compels lenders to share more?
The next step to understanding our user was to illustrate all their frustrations through a scenario where the lender has a negative experience lending an item to a friend who damages it in the process. We identified areas of opportunity within the experience and set goals to combat communication problems.
DESIGN DECISIONS
So what should we design?
We started the ideation process by setting refined design goals to help guide our brainstorming process, allowing us to better define valuable qualities necessary for our solution to create a lasting impact on lenders.
NARROWING DOWN
Our initial designs were rough
With our goals aligned, we began thinking of solutions. We brainstormed over 12 creative features that would increase the enjoyability of the item borrowing process and encourage active conversations between lenders and borrowers. Our initial designs include…
As the ideation sprint lead, I decided to utilize dot voting, affinity mapping, prioritization matrix, and heuristics to choose which ideas best matched our initial question and design goals. I ruled out ones that were too impractical or seemed fun, but didn’t have a big enough impact.
OUR 3 FINALISTS
OPTION 1
Seasonal Statistics 👍
Users were curious to see how the sustainability aspect could be emphasized. This sustainability tracker could be a good way to motivate lenders, and could be tied into the aforementioned rewards, badges, and levels aspect of the app.
How it works 🌿
Similar to Spotify Wrapped, this motivational feature shows the impacts of users' borrowing and lending behavior. Incentives for such behavior could encouraging messages such as , “you have saved carbon dioxide equivalent to taking __ many cars off the road!”
OPTION 2
Lending Leaderboard 👍
The lending leaderboard encourages friendly competition amongst users and their friends, boosting engagement and fostering a supportive atmosphere where members can celebrate achievements.
How it works 🌿
This would be a leaderboard showing who's active and lending the most within a community. This feature could further be extended to inter-community interactions, where communities compete amongst themselves to see which lends the most!
OPTION 3
Borrow Selfies 👍
This is a feature where the act of borrowing and lending is publicized, encouraging others to borrow more and guaranteeing safer returns. The emoji comment reactions also enhances the platform's visual appeal and strengthens user connections.
How it works 🌿
Users can post themselves using the item they borrowed; when they do so, it moves to the top of the screen. Other users can comment and react to keep interactions fun and casual.
MVP DESIGN
Choosing the Borrow Feed
We ended up combining the "Lending Leaderboard" with "Borrow Selfies" because, compared to the other ideas, these two designs proved to be the most impactful whilst encouraging community building and maximizing accountability. We redesigned the community page with newly chosen illustrations and pops of color to boost Community Gearbox’s personality, making it feel more inviting and casual.
MEASURING SUCCESS
Making sure our designs made an impact!
We gave Dante our deliverables and he implemented our Borrow Feed in further iterations of the platform. I am happy to say that the current version of the app utilizes elements of our design, including color scheme and illustrations. I brainstormed a few metrics I would use to measure success in case the Borrow Feed is ever shipped.
Item Return Rate
If our solution successfully increased accountability, then the percentage of items damaged/lost without repercussion would significantly decrease.
Customer Retention Rate
One of the biggest problems with Community Gearbox was the low lender return rate. Our hope is that the community building aspect of our ideas will make lenders eager to return.
Feature Engagement
If users are consistently interested in the feature, they will often interact with it — making this the best way to measure the success of gamifying the lending process.
REFLECTIONS
Gearboxers Unite
This project was a great learning experience because we had to completely change direction 2 months into the project. We were stuck in our research and had to return to the beginning and rethink who we were designing for. I learned that sometimes taking risks is ok, and that changing direction halfway can result in a positive outcome. It was insightful learning how to build relationships through the borrowing and lending process.
Thank you for taking the time to look at my work!