Beyond Design: The “Strategic Redesign” of Pouchii App

This article is an exploration of the Pouchii Application Redesign. My goal is to shed light on the deliberate effort to craft a mobile experience that not only caters to the diverse needs of our user community but also elevates the platform to new heights of visual appeal and functionality.?

Pouchii: A Seamless Community Platform

Picture Pouchii as your go-to buddy, seamlessly connecting you with your community. The application invites users to instantly become a part of their community with tailored features that foster connections among business owners, casual service providers, and home service professionals.

Even with the best team of developers, no app design is future-proof.

The choice of a redesign is never a simple one and should be well thought out before diving in. Our goal was to spruce things up by making Pouchii not just work better but also look cooler. This means redesigning the interface to not only meet the needs of our diverse user-base but also contribute to a more cohesive and visually appealing mobile presence.

Identifying what to Change and What to Keep

This phase was a bit like Spring Cleaning. From the early stages, we had involved the product team, support team and business team to work with us in identifying existing issues and making sure we don’t throw out the good stuff while also achieving our business goals. The existing app already served a vital role for both individual and business users, and our goal was to improve upon it without causing disruption. Think of it as upgrading your phone without losing all your precious photos and documents. This process involved a meticulous examination of what processes needed to change and what aspects could remain unchanged to maintain continuity.

Challenges & Solutions

It would be remiss to write without highlighting some challenges and friction that were faced - Techie Hiccups, opinions flying around, and even a bit of head-scratching within the design team. It was easy to move past these, though, thanks to a little wisdom on the aim of every stakeholder in the development of a product from the book “Articulating Design Decisions.” With our goal of maintaining a delicate balance between innovation, user experience, and business goals, the strategic approach we took in making our final decisions involved identifying components that had contributed to our success and building around them.

The “Quick Action” Section: Balancing User Needs and Business Goals

The “Quick Action” section played a pivotal role in facilitating users' easy access to the most essential features. Initially, the Home Page Design featured eight options in this section, a number we deemed could potentially overwhelm users with cognitive overload. To address this concern, we made the strategic decision to streamline it to four options, giving rise to several critical questions:

• What four features would we prioritize?
• Should users be granted the freedom to make this decision themselves?
• Should we base it on what is crucial for our business?
• Should we opt for automation, allowing the system to update itself based on the most frequently used features?

Each of these questions presented its own set of advantages and disadvantages, prompting thorough consideration by the product and business teams.

Several factors influenced our decision-making process. Providing users with excessive control might hinder their ability to fully experience the product. On the other hand, complete automation could lead to confusion, particularly in the early stages, and potentially limit user autonomy. Moreover, choosing features solely based on business priorities contradicted our overarching goal of achieving a user-centric design.

We revisited the results of our comprehensive qualitative and quantitative research to pinpoint the features that users found most helpful while engaging with our product. This not only provided an immediate answer to our current question but also lays the foundation for ongoing monitoring of user activities in this area. Our intention is to closely observe user behaviors, allowing us to continuously refine and optimize our services to better cater to their needs.

Design, at its Core: The Art of Creative Problem Solving

Design, at its core, is the art of solving problems creatively, unrestricted by limitations. Our goal to achieve a User-Centric design remained unchanged through it all. My team, along with relevant stakeholders, cautiously examined the User Interface, reevaluated features, and considered both quantitative and qualitative feedback to ensure our redesign enhanced the user experience.

A feature that was introduced into the redesign based on feedback was the Group Savings feature, allowing users to come together and achieve their savings goal.

Sneak Peek- Testing Stage

The testing stage was like a sneak peek before a movie release. Following our intensive collaboration with the Product, Support and Marketing team, a harmonized suite of Pouchii variations emerged. A series of presentations and prototype testing occurred, and our design successfully moved into the development stages. The Head of the Quality Assurance team reached out to me with excitement about the changes, and it was time to test our product in a live environment. The first variation of Pouchii that was released was Pouchii Verse, designed for InHouse usage, and a focus group was selected to experience the app and give feedback.

The process of reviewing these feedbacks would usually involve a representative from the Product Team, Quality Assurance team, and Marketing Team. This new feedback posed some fundamental questions that prompted us to reconsider certain decisions we had made.?

We used the most effective approach of gathering feedback from users. Through surveys, we obtained valuable data on the challenges users encountered with the existing app. This information, and more guided our design decisions.?- Adaeze Chamberlain

Feedback, Iterations & Deployment

Coincidentally, a new CBN policy was passed during this stage, and we had to take another step back on some onboarding decisions we had made. As a mandatory policy that took effect immediately, we had a series of meetings and all our products were reviewed to determine how we would collect this mandatory information during the onboarding process without negatively affecting the user experience.?

Pouchii Verse has been successfully released to general users, as well as other variations, while some remain in work. Early feedback has been positive, and we remain actively in search of how else we can improve the experience of our users with this product.

For a full scoop of our redesign adventure, check out the detailed case study here; https://www.behance.net/gallery/188111073/Pouchii-Redesign??

No app is complete without user input and seeing how this is a redesign, we had the best medium to get accurate feedback from actual users. We conducted a survey that gave us data regarding the main pain points the users faced with the existing app. This guided our design decisions and helped us stay on track.