Leafly
Leafly app — Creating a UX strategy and re-building the experience. Like Beyonce once told us, time to upgrade you.
For over the past few years, Leafly iOS and Android applications were not a priority — even with higher traffic than mobile web. The lack of attention to the experience became dependent on the efficient evolution of the web experience and the changes to the iOS guidelines. As a result, it became awkwardly outdated quickly.
As I lead the design and app strategy for the customer's experience, I relied on aligning with the product roadmap, business goal, and the shifting industry legalization. Through this, I was able to accomplish thoughtful parity updates and intentional exclusive moments for a natural native experience.
Identifying the strategy was an interesting challenge to tackle as I was also having to design for an outdated and broken experience in tandem.
Responsibilities:
UX Strategy
Product Design
Visual Design
Research
Testing
Challenges
Designing the needed UX updated and creating the strategy
Differentiating dependencies between Android and iOS
Project goals
Identify the apps customer value and purpose statement
Solve for the Main touchpoint for customers
HMW enable customers personal mico-moments
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Discovery & teardowns
The goal of this phase is to conduct a thorough study on successful experiences in the e-commerce industry. This will bring light to pattern conventions and best practices that will inform us of app users' expectations, also used as a validation checkpoint. Finally, we can use these comparisons to advocate for UX solutions.
The outcome of this exercise cleared up initial assumptions and priorities. I was able to lay out open questions that would be solved with quantitative and qualitative data. I connected with our BI squad and teamed up with a PM to support upcoming features.
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Synthesizing data
Auditing our app experience helped target issues to clear up and expose areas that need attention to ultimately create an effective experience for our users. During discovery, I pulled qualitative data from Firebase and GA. In addition, a solid collection of reviews and results from an in-app survey a qualitative view. This helped synthesize learnings and a swat analysis that will enable us to prioritize the now, next, future approach.
With this total exposure of a baseline, I then tapped into building out a framework. This framework will focus on critical personalized experiences.
The framework
Now, with a bird's eye view of the current experience, the goal is to break it all down and see all the connecting tissues of the experience. This framework intends to visualize where the Go, Do, Buy, Know micro-moments provide value.
The framework will be a lens for the Home screen, Strain, Store, Account, Notification, and Orders experience.
From this, I worked with my product manager on scoping out features based on the roadmap and UX priorities. *This framework is also a org document that serves as a checkpoint with evolving business goals.
Navigation overhaul
Revising the navigation toolbar and side drawer gives our customers an aligned and guided experience without feeling overwhelmed with the magnitude of information Leafly offers.
After extensive iterations, we reached a solution that embraces Leafy’s core resources of browsing, ordering, and the expectations of the authenticated users’ personalized experience.
Outcome post launch:
+.45% traffic growth
+50% increase in ATB rate
+2.8% increase in orders
Building a foundation.
The first scope of work aligned from the strategy was to upgrade the home screen to leverage our design system (Botanic) and personalize an Active Order feature. This fosters trust by enabling our customers to have a live status of their order, this is a big win that removes any friction.
Continuing into our strain detail experiences. This is more than an educational moment for customers who are novice to cannabis and ones looking for something different. We found through user studies this is also a shoppable opportunity, and testing is ongoing with an iterative process.
Furthering the expansive updates, we are now moving into testing the holistic ordering experiencing; active order, reviewing, reordering and recommendations.
NEXT STEPS