V Locator: Veganism, Leveled Up!
Overview
Nick Houanche, a passionate entrepreneur deeply affected by the health consequences of high meat consumption within his family, founded V Locator in 2017. His mission is to make the vegan lifestyle more accessible, and he envisions V Locator as a central hub for the vegan community. To attract investors and propel the company out of its pre-revenue stage, Nick seeks to significantly enhance the V Locator product.
The Goal
Understand the user and the business needs to create a better V Locator that delivers on both sides, creating the balance needed to be a successful product.
The Problem
As a business, V Locator has noticed that their user engagement, new account conversion, and customer satisfaction was in a downward trend, causing them to reach out for assistance. In addition to this, their users are needing a more central vegan hub that provides a sense of community, a way to find and access vegan meals, and a way to further their education around the vegan lifestyle.
Team Structure
1 UX Lead/Design Lead (Me)
1 Research Lead
1 UX Generalist
A New Challenge Appears!
In early 2024, I was working as an early career freelance UX Designer, anxiously awaiting the next project that would push my skillset to new heights. If you’ve ever watched Dragon Ball Z, just think of a young Goku who wants to fight everyone for some odd reason. I’m that guy, just in UX form (not quite as cool as a Super Sayian because my hair is still black, but it’ll do 😆)!
At last, my next challenge appeared. V Locator was in its early start-up phase. Founded by Nick Houanche back in 2017, V Locator’s mission is and has always been to make the vegan lifestyle more accessible to others. After having several family members pass stemming from diets that heavily involved the consumption of meat, an activated Nick took strong initiative to launch V Locator. Armed with a powerful story and ambition, Nick launched several iterations of the V Locator app. After some time passed with his app struggling to strike a chord with his users, Nick decided it was time to get some help.
So, allow me to re-introduce myself:
V Locator, meet… A crazy UX Designer with an equally nuts team ready to do some damage to the problem at hand 🤪.
Let’s get to work.
Super Sayian Goku getting ready to fight
Hold your horses, buddy. What was the problem?
As a start-up in its pre-revenue phase, V Locator had several key metrics that needed drastic improvement to help solidify its proof of concept and improve its outlook for investors. Those metrics were:
New account conversion
User session times
Usability and satisfaction
In addition to the business needs, our users also had several needs that we had to address to make this app successful:
A community they could go to for support
A way to start/further their education around veganism
A place to find vegan restaurants in the wild and recipes for cooking at home
With the needs of the business and the users in mind, I asked myself and my team the million dollar question: How can we bridge the gap between the needs of these 2 groups to create the balanced approach that V Locator needs to be successful?
SPOILER ALERT: I did NOT gain a million dollars by answering this question, but I did gain a ton of insight! Let’s get into it!
New Account Conversion = Onboarding Flow
V Locator: How do we get users to create new accounts?
Marc: (sips drink)… Hold my drink, will ya?
The initial iteration of the V Locator app didn’t communicate to its users the main functionalities of the app, leaving a lot of room for misunderstanding and frustration. It was kind of like being dropped off at some random place by a random person who just looked at you and said “good luck” before driving off and leaving you to figure it out. Definitely not the most fun experience in the world (unless you dig that kind of thrill, which is fine 😅).
Furthermore, there were several screens that only said “Login to get access to our feature” with no indication of what the feature was.
Empty state on profile screen
After conducting several usability tests, I found that users would often navigate to other screens in the app, ignoring the sign-up prompts due to the uncertainty. To add on to this, these confusing screens were the only screens that asked users to sign up. This is where V Locator’s lack of new accounts issue comes to play.
To solve these problems, I led a workshop with my team to ideate a new onboarding flow that would prompt users to sign up immediately after the welcome message when launching the app for the first time while educating the user on the offerings of the new V Locator app throughout the rest of the flow. I focused heavily on the copy, making sure that the messages on each screen sounded and felt natural so users would understand and trust the app.
Screens from some of the onboarding flow
This new onboarding flow would help solve V Locator’s need for new account conversion while ultimately improving the user experience, achieving that business and user balance I mentioned earlier. Now that’s what I call a win-win! Let’s keep that going, shall we?
User Session Times = Community Hub, Recipes, and V-EDU
Next up on the business needs list: getting users to stick around! Honestly, there wasn’t much to do on V Locator. Sure, you could find some vegan spots nearby, but then... crickets. It was like playing a video game where that super helpful guide suddenly runs out of things to say, leaving you wandering aimlessly. That's a major buzzkill and the last thing we wanted for V Locator.
Our goal was to retain our users, not watch them run back to Instagram. So, the challenge: How do we give V Locator features that create that stickiness?
To figure this out, I got with my research lead to plan out user interviews. Although this app is based on veganism, we targeted vegans, vegetarians, and omnivores who are intentional about incorporating plant based meals in their diet with the goal of making this an app anyone can use.
We conducted 15 interviews with the following research objectives:
Understand the users motivations for incorporating non-animal based food into their diets.
Understand the pain points users experience while implementing non-animal based food into their lifestyle.
Understand how other applications create long-term relationships with its users.
Understand users' educational and support needs as it relates to a food app.
The insights we gathered from these interviews clearly pointed towards the need for a way to get educated around veganism, find community within the lifestyle, and find recipes in addition to places to eat locally.
To address these needs, I created a new Community Hub where users could post about their experiences and reach out to others, a Recipe page so users can find vegan recipes, and an education hub called V-EDU where users could get all levels of education around veganism.
Left to right: Recipe Listing Screen, Recipe Detail Screen, Community Hub Screen, V-EDU Lesson Screen
With these new features in place, users now have multiple reasons to interact with the app for longer, giving V Locator the longer user session times it needs to show investors that the app has a consistent and engaged user base.
Usability and satisfaction = Streamlined user flows through testing
Ok so now we are cooking with some grease! I’ve added some new features and the product is feeling pretty ready. So now what?
Random person in the background: You launch it?
Me: NO! It’s time to do some testing, buddy! Good try though!
Jokes aside (although I am quite the jokester), I had me and my team do 5 usability tests to see how these features would work in the hands of our users. We found that testing went extremely well. Here are what the results looked like:
Usability Test Results
Although our testing results looked pretty solid, they didn’t tell the full story. Here are a couple of findings I pulled from our usability tests:
Users did not understand how the community hub worked due to an extra screen that acted as a “gateway” into the actual community hub.
Users did not find swiping to be intuitive to navigate to the next page of a lesson in V-EDU
Users wanted to have access to lessons they had completed within V-EDU
With these insights in mind, I made some iterations to the design to account for the qualitative insights we pulled from testing:
Community hub before and after testing
V-EDU lesson before and after testing
V-EDU lesson before testing
V-EDU lesson after testing
Figma Prototype
Results
Overwhelmingly positive feedback from the client and his team, and users
Increased user satisfaction due to improved usability
New features led to increased engagement and stickiness to the product
The client and his team feel that they have a compelling case for investors
Learnings
This project was a ton of fun and extremely rewarding. The reaction we received overwhelmed me and my team with pure joy, and the growth we experienced was such an awesome experience. With that said, every project has it’s challenges and this was no exception.
I had a team member who was not contributing at the level needed. In a 3 member team, I knew that it was extremely important to have everyone on the same page and contributing each day to move the process forward. In addition, time was a hot commodity that was becoming more rare as we kept advancing the project, making the need for the team to be rolling on all cylinders even more important.
To assure that I kept the team on the right track, I reached out to a mentor for some advice on how to navigate the situation. I learned that when you have someone like this on a team, one of the best things you can do is work collaboratively with that person in a way that gives back some control over their process while still providing them with a sense of ownership of their key deliverables. This was important to me as I never want to demotivate anyone, and I am always the coach on a team who wants to continue to build his people to be the best version of themselves.
The end result is something that I'm proud of. The team chemistry was in great shape. In working collaboratively with this individual, I was able to pull out some of the individual's best work, giving this person a sense of fulfillment. Finally, I grew immensely; not only as a designer, but as a leader. Being a people leader and a solid human being are things that are no joking matter for me. I take these areas of my life very seriously, and I am beyond thrilled that I could utilize my leadership skills in such an empowering way. Truthfully, this was profound for me.