ID.Buzz Community
UX Research • Workshop Facilitation • Product Design
Overview
Making an online community the go-to source of information for owners and fans of the new ID.Buzz
Client
Volkswagen Group
Timeline
10 Month Project
Methods
+ User interviews + Affinity mapping + Personas + Benchmark analysis + Ideation + User interface design + Usability testing
Role
Senior Product Designer
The Challenge.
Build a community that enables ID.Buzz fans and owners to get together, share information, reviews, and the brand can also share exclusive news and answer their questions.
Business Goals
& Opportunities.
Volkswagen wanted to increase the popularity of the ID.Buzz and create a bigger community between fans.
01
Create a community
of passionate ID.Buzz early adopters to reach long-term effects for the brand
02
Engage with existing owners to generate more hype around the new ID.Buzz
04
Increase sales of the ID.Buzz with the help of this community
03
Attract leads of potential customers with topic-based targeting
Advocating for User Research.
Previously marketing research had been completed and the feature requirements had been scoped. But the research had a focus on marketing content, instead of product, and did not validate the proposed solution.
What did we do?
We advocated to the business to do further user research to better understand the why behind the need for community. We did this by explaining what we still needed to find out:
Is there really a need for an exclusive ID.Buzz community?
Are all the required features needed for the MVP?
Is there a need for a native mobile app?
Technical Research.
We then conducted a technical research study to find out how best to implement the community.
We analysed 16 platforms and proposed 2 off-the-shelf solutions as the most cost effective and efficient solution to the business, versus a custom build solution.
However, due to limitations of features available, and control over the user database, they opted for a custom build.
User Interviews.
We conducted a benchmark analysis of existing ID.Buzz communities and found a wide array of online communities dedicated to the new ID.Buzz.
What these communities proved was the desire to share and connect with each other about the van.
From this analysis, we identified potential user interviewees ranging from top community contributors to administrators. We reached out to a total of 60 people, and managed to have 15 user interviews in the time frame of 2 weeks.
15
User interviews
9
ID.Buzz owners
35-70
Age range
6
ID.Buzz fans
We discovered why they were creating communities.
People love the ID.Buzz. But there are some problems with order delays and waiting periods, poor communication and lack of access to information. So, they created their own solutions to help each other and get relevant information.
Key User Insights.
And we discovered what they really need.
01
Single point of truth
People want a centralised place for press releases, exclusive content and all technical information, instead of searching for information on different websites
02
Trustworthy source of information
Content moderators and VW technical experts should provide the latest news, software updates, answer questions and spark discussion
04
Organised navigation structure
Users have problems finding relevant information scrolling through posts. A well-organised navigation structure with categories, groups, and universal search is essential
03
Lively engagement
Users will only be in a community if there is a lively exchange. Community administrators should encourage interaction with polls, quizzes, and competitions
Ideation.
We presented these research findings to our stakeholders before kicking off the product’s inception together.
With the user insights in hand, we managed to narrow down the extensive feature list to the absolute essentials and prioritise what we planned to build for the MVP together with our stakeholders.
We kicked-off this phase by facilitating a collaborative workshop with our team and stakeholders to create the Personas and brainstormed together on how we could solve the main user problems in the form of Jobs to Be Done.
User Personas.
Prioritisation.
We decided to prioritise by focusing on the end-user personas, and only after that focus on the community moderator, since this would bring more value to users initially.
We started by fleshing out the basic functionalities expected from a community, and after usability testing, we would explore other nice-to-have features.
The Solution.
Homefeed
How Might We foster a lively community exchange?
We focused on designing features that encourage interaction and cater to content creation such as: creating posts, adding images, adding comments, replying to comments, and reacting to posts.
Explore
How Might We enable users to find relevant information easily and quickly?
We added universal search, content categories, groups to follow specific topics, and an explore page to discover new content.
Profile
How Might We make an interesting user profile to foster exchange?
The community should be open to both owners and fans of the ID.Buzz. Labels should be added to profiles according to types of users: owners and fans; community administrators and top contributors.
It should provide fields for more detailed information such as location, interests, and car model.
Usability Tests.
We decided to test early with end users to get feedback on the basic functionality of the app.
We received some detailed feedback from the tests related to app functionality, expected behaviour and layout.
81.88
SUS Score
7/10
NPS Score
Key Outcomes.
01
As a result of our research efforts we managed to change the mindset and gain the trust of our stakeholders to let us focus on creating a user-centered product.
02
We managed to narrow down the MVP feature scope from 35 features to the bare minimum that would meet the basic expectations of our users. With the plan to include nice-to-have features identified in the user research in the future.
04
We caused a shift in perception of our tech unit from software delivery to a strategic product partner creating further opportunities with VW Commercial Vehicles.
03
We collaborated with the design system team on improvements and added new components to the existing design library.