Example poster to capture new users in a city

Case study: idea to pitchable product

Published in

Bootcamp

8 min readApr 4, 2021

There is no better feeling then going from the light bulb idea to a pitchable product. It’s not the hunt of creating the hottest startup. I guess its just my hobby.

The problem

Covid-19 has restricted travel for all of us the last year, which made literally made us stranded at home. Even though I’m living in Sweden with no lockdowns I’m still restricted. The sociologist in me would describe it as a city-wide panopticon.

This has presented me with some challenges
1. I’m bored
2. I need to get out more from the house (but away from people)
3. Walking have almost an exponential curve of boring (time spent - monotonous axis)

With a big interest in history, urban design, and being in love with Roman Mars's book The 99% Invisible City, it hits me.

What would I like to have to get my ass out of the house and walk some more?

Goal

My Proposal

Merge the concepts of “A walk down history lane”, Podcasts, Rich media, history, and exploring in solitude into something that reaches the goals.

I want the experience to also be built on some fundamental rules

Build the experience to be largely screen-free and make users look up and experience the world around them.
Lead the journey (Limit options once you’ve started)
Focus on learning & growth
Try to drive users to do something “good for the city” (Don’t know about this yet)

Research

As this is a hobby for me and not a way to become Mark Zuckerberg research will not be that extensive outside my own perspective. Generally, I wanted to just explore the following things to support the experience direction.

Audio on the rise (Podcasts, Audiobooks Clubhouse, and so on)

2020/2021 was a very interesting year for audio. Podcasts hit all-time highs and the entrance of Spotify podcasts and clubhouse.

Following the money on this one makes it very clear that audio is here to stay.

Spotify reports that a quarter of all users engaged with podcast content in the final three months of 2020.
Audiobooks saw a growth of between 2019 and 2020 a 16% market value growth in the United States alone.
The new entrant Clubhouse that hits 10M users in less than a year.

% of Americans who have ever listened to a podcast: 2017–2020

A community of creators

I have for a long time been enjoying different facebooks-groups in Stockholm that continuously sharing stories, old photos and also make “before and now”-comparisons.

The largest group in Stockholm has 144k users with 16 new posts per day. Similar groups can be found in most major cities around the world.

The remarkable thing is the quality and storytelling in them. Many of them could only be written due to the author was there when it happened. Other users both contribute to the stories with other photos, memories, and fact-checking.

Fitness craze

The growth of a healthy lifestyle and the perfect body has been on a steep growth curve for the last 10–15 years. Covid-19 has affected the gym and fitness studio but the growth continues. From a revenue standpoint, the fitness and health industries are growing at a rate of 8.7% per year.

For me, Covid-19 took away my commute and on average 5500 steps per day (comparison 2019/2020).

Target user

The target user is based on a rough characterization of me.

The user that needs to get moving because of health reasons
Enjoys doing things by themselves
Want to reduce screen-time
Want to explore their surrounding

Key flows

I’ve started to map out the overall experience to understand the key flows that I needed to wireframe. I always try to keep it within the magic of 3.

This flow ensures a feedback-loop between the product and its users. It also makes it easier for users to find great stories even when more stories is community-generated

Wireframes & key concepts

When I produce wireframes I think UX-writing should be a requirement. It forces you to create the experience you want. Lorem Ipsum at this stage hinders you to uncover opportunities.

Some mentions about the wireframes:

Finding content is commodity-design. I stole the design from the great ones as Scribd, Amazon and bookbeat. It almost came out of the box from the wireframe kit as well.

Removing screen-time while knowing where to go was a real challenge to wrap my head around. Generally, the best way to combat this is to increase the number of parts in the stories. This will reduce the distance the user has to walk and open the phone for direction.

Prompting users at the right time & location is important to both start the story to end parts. The best option is to use GPS-tracking but clever design can remove the need for more options/screen time.

Some product experience concepts were also created during the wireframes.

Stories are the content of the product that focuses on storytelling. The key difference to an audiobook is that these stories require physical movement and include rich media.

Storyteller is the content creators that develop and upload stories for users.

Chapters are how the product and its storytellers section larger stories into smaller chunks. This enables the user to stop if they need and pick it up later moment. As described earlier, this will make it easier to correctly navigate without screen time.

End of the chapter is where storytellers can include rich media such as images, videos, and text to let users fully emerge into the story.

Friendly user testing

I wanted to get early feedback on this before taking the time to turn wireframes into high-fidelity UI. I choose to focus on three key research goals.

Can they find and complete a story in the prototype with little assistance?
What would they like to improve?
What design considerations do I have to take with me into UI design.

In total, I performed X user interviews where I briefly presented the concept and them let them go through the prototype. Some key themes came out of it:

In short;

They like

Seeing how much time it will take to fit in my schedule
Seeing where I will walk and how complex the route is. I like to know what to expect. How many stops, times.
The notifications were nice.
The chapter ends with images and videos is great for letting me go back in history.

They don't like

Include time and distance in the detailed view of the story
Provide more information about each chapter
The description of the stories needs to be more compelling

Worries/questions to solve

How do I know I’m in the right place / looking at the right thing?
How do I know if I’m walking too fast /slow?
Is there a way of doing this together with someone? I like to explore/travel with other people

UI Design

I wanted to do speed design on this, which meant going into Envato elements (Spotify for creative materials) and scour for different design templates. For this, I need a mix of different UI kits between audiobooks, navigation app, and social media.

The final results can be found below. Before putting this into development it needs some love from a real designer. There is also a bunch of screens as signup, onboarding, profile, sharing, pop-ups, and smaller flows to be designed.

How to drive growth

Competition is fierce in the app space. So how would you take this concept into a successful product? I usually focus on figuring out the Acquisition loop

Acquisition loop

Generally, apps like this would be suitable for a freemium to Premium business model. E.g letting users get a free taste and then convert them to a paid membership when they want more.

So the key KPI for this type of product is conversion. That “hook moment” or as Facebook would call it the “7 Friends in 10 Days”-moment.

Finding out the optimal number of how many free stories to give users before forcing them to upgrade is the most important thing to do. It’s both a conversion as a retention question.

So the second challenge is how to engage the users to keep listening to stories. As the first task for research, design & analytics to figure out is what makes users retain/upgrade. Some examples of hypotheses I would ask them to prove or disprove.

Users prefer stories that are close to them than what they are interested about
Users that listen to three free stories are more likely to convert to paid subscription than users listening to one free story.
Users like stories that are shorter than 30 min long to complete
Users like stories with low complex routes with fewer turns
Users should listen to at least one story per month to keep their premium subscription

Answering these hypotheses will then fuel product decisions, user personas, and what type of stories to focus on.