Building a new quip experience.

Quip is an electric toothbrush and oral care subscription service. Quip and dentists worked together to create a simple, affordable, and enjoyable oral care brush and service experience for everyone. Quip set out to prove that good design has a bigger impact on oral health than quick fix gimmicks. 

 My role at quip had me as a lead product designer for their new mobile app "Astor" (the code name of the app at the time). We wanted to create a new app to help customers begin to track and support daily good oral habits. This app too would later be a roadmap to become a larger ecosystem for customers— which would integrate the newly (at the time of this writing) quip-care service which is a new pre-paid insurance arm of quip and bring in the quip shopping experience all within one app for customers.  I started off with the early start of Astor helping bring this app to life and collaborated closely with stakeholders, directors, PMs, hardware teams, developers and marketing. The biggest challenge in the beginning of this app is being so far ahead of the hardware and building something without really understanding the hardware and thus a lot of competitive research of current electic toothbrushes and their pairing-apps was a huge help to understand both the current apps/brushes out there but also how the hardware interacts with the app, limitations of the software and hardware, and pain points of current apps. When working on this project, I worked in parallel on 2 versions of the app. One for MVP to get an Alpha build out for hardware testing and user testing various designs and another app that is more polished,more robust UI, more playful immersive experience with the use of animated elements and adding in future feature sections such as quip-care, and shopping. 

This is my break-down of the overall processes I used to help define, design for, test and refine the Astor app during its early course. This is still a new product and a lot of the features, use-cases, and user flows/journeys are still being polished and updated, so below are some early examples and processes used to help get us to an early Alpha MVP and in time and more work to a full featured beta and release candidate.     

—Let's Go. 

ROLES

PRODUCT DESIGN

EXPERIENCE DESIGN

RESEARCH

PROTOTYPING

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Overview

With a new app in the founders eye, a roadmap and team now in action, we were left asking. Where do we start.We had a short timeline to get the app at an MVP level to reach the targeted launch goal.The goal was a challenge as we were now competing with other dental care apps such as Colgate, and Oral B in a small market space for dental apps.So where did we start? 

How can we use various forms of data.

Data is a designers best pal for crafting an experience that delights and guides a user around a product with ease. We as designers cannot make our decisions based just on what we think or believe we know. We have to research, and engage our users to better understand their experience and insights when using a product so we may design the best possible experiences for the user and meet the goals of the business too. When pondering how best to create this new app experience for quip customers I started to question what data would help us best do this. Thus below are a few points I begin to ponder about when starting off on this project.

 1░

Focus on our users.

• Create mental models of our users, This helps design for their expectations and understanding from other apps to Astor
• Understand how users interact with tracking apps to find out what they may expect from something similar
• Be clear, set a focus on screens. User attention is short and users are less likely to notice things not expected
• Understand and create simple outlines models of current users motivations, goals, needs, desires, and behaviors
• Users and reviewers favor the quip brand for its minimal design, keep this model in UX/UI

 2░

Current Analytics.

• Understand what users are doing on quip now, IE shopping, reading blogs, etc.
• Current customer engagement, and ways bring a similar experience to the Astor app
  
• Understand different click events. How many users interact with sale-headers, featured actions, and item-suggestions
• Identify the scenarios which are failing for most users. Such as common page journeys causing high bounce/exits 
• Understand how current users react to promotion, and rewards,can we use this behavior to make the app sticky

  3░

Evaluation testing.

• Testing a set of tasks from users help determines errors, painpoints and areas of improvement 
• Employ qualitative data research from user testing to understand how customers use the app an refine design
• Quantitative data is measurable IE, rates of success, goals, task completion time to complete, etc.
• Test various elements, IE are UI elements clear and easy to interact with, are messages and action clear
• Testing helps reduce,unintuitive designs, and limits reworking designs solutions later in the game

Researching current trends with Think Google

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As I do with most of my projects, I enjoy to get a lay of the land in terms of current trends, what users are doing or not doing and overall simply reset myself to what is happening in the current landscape. I took upon Think with Google's service to unearth some current data points of users that relate to both quips mission and our goal for quips Astor app.

I use these data points along with trend articles from Think w/ Google and used them to help me understand current users and build user personas to design user experiences against. Some of these data points I found interesting are points such as parents searching for "kids brushing apps" has gone up 60% which I can align to quips new line of kids brushes and bring to the table a possible kids feature to the app, thus add more value to customers who are parents, use quip currently and have kids. Data points like 63% of people who download an app for a deal/reward, delete the app soon after helps me understand we need to offer more benefits to the user other than a deal to help keep the users sticky and maintain higher retention.  Also another set of data points such as seeing and up tick in health and fitness apps lets me know users do value some sort of health/fitness tracking apps and allows me to further dig into competitive research and see what these app have to offer their own users and get insight to how they layout their apps, features, and services to users. Think w/ Google does not answer all my questions about trends and users, but it's a nice place to begin getting a basic understanding. 

87%

of smartphone users who reported tracking their own health activity on their smartphones in the past month used apps to do so.

 63%

of people say that when forced to download an app to access a deal, they will typically delete it shortly thereafter.

81%

of mobile users are more likely to purchase from companies with mobile sites or apps.

>50%

of people say they won’t consider purchasing from a brand that has a poorly designed mobile site.

65%

Queries for health and fitness apps, such as “Nike Training” or “Strava" have increased 65% YOY.

^65%

Searches for parenting/family-related apps, such as "brushing teeth app for kids " have grown 65% YoY.

SOURCES

1. Google/Ipsos, U.S., Playbook Omnibus 2019, n=1,610 U.S. online smartphone users, A18+, Jan. 2019.

2. Google/Heart+Mind Strategies, U.S., “Getting Things Done on Mobile,” n=1,847, A18+ smartphone users, Dec. 2017.

3. Google/Ipsos, U.S., Playbook Omnibus 2019, n=1,610 U.S. online smartphone users, A18+, Jan. 2019.

4. Google/Heart+Mind Strategies, U.S., “Getting Things Done on Mobile,” n=1,847, A18+ smartphone users, Dec. 2017

5. Google Data, U.S., Mobile, Jan.–Sept. 2016 vs. Jan.–Sept. 2017

6. Google Data, U.S., Mobile, Jan.–Sept. 2016 vs. Jan.–Sept. 2017

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