Meeting user and business needs - Heart of Steel engraving
A British Heart Foundation online fundraising product that allows customers to donate by engraving a name and date on a timeless work of art.
What is the Heart of Steel?
The Heart of Steel is a monumental sculpture in Yorkshire with space to engrave 150,000 names.
Donations made to engrave a name go directly to the British Heart Foundation and help fund vital research into the world’s biggest killers. Conditions like stroke, heart diseases, vascular dementia and diabetes.
Problem
New functionality = Reduce calls to the Customer Service Center
The Customer Service Team were receiving on average 28 calls a month to take payment from our customers who wanted an engraving with 2 dates which isn’t possible via the online journey.
User story
"As a BHF donor, I want to be able to have 2 dates with my engraving so that I can remember someone I loved who passed away."
Our goals/objectives were to:
Reduce the number of calls coming into the Customer Service Center (CSC)
Implement the functionality to online journey to allow the user to engrave 2 dates
Persona
Eight personas, representing the main British Heart Foundation audiences were created in collaboration with Sift Digital.
The persona displayed below, representing our donor audience was continuously used throughout the Heart of Steel project.
Name: Linda
Age: 60
Location: Stirling
Life stage: Retired
BHF familiarity: High
“The British Heart Foundation were there for my dad. I want to give something back.”
Situation
Linda has been aware of the BHF for a long time. Her dad died of a heart condition a number of years ago, and she remembers him being given literature from the BHF during his time in hospital which was really helpful. Since her dad died Linda has tried to support the BHF wherever possible, for example by buying BHF Christmas cards and by putting a few pounds in a collecting tin whenever she sees one. She also makes a larger donation to the BHF every year around the anniversary of her dad’s death, with the amount varying according to how much she feels she can spare at the time. Despite her warmth towards the BHF, Linda hasn’t really thought about setting up a monthly payment. She prefers to give ad hoc, and doesn’t see any reason to change this.
Top tasks
Linda has £100 to donate in memory of her dad and decides to submit the donation online. She makes an ‘in memory’ donation and receives a thank you email explaining some of the research the BHF has spent donations on, and what recent advances there have been. While on the website Linda notices a box which promotes the BHF supporters’ newsletter. This was shown to her as the site identified her as a supporter or potential supporter based on the pages she’d viewed. Linda decides to sign up, and receives email updates which focus on the link between donations and groundbreaking research.
My role
I led the design of this functionality from beginning to end. I worked alongside product owner, content strategist and front and back end developer.
The 2 dates functionality was implemented on 28th July 2020.
What I did
Feedback investigation
Sketching and prototyping
User testing
Pattern documentation and best practices
Scope and constraints
The initial scope and the main focus of the project was to implement the functionality of being able to enter 2 dates with an engraving. Other recommendations where suggested, discussed and prioritised amongst the teams so that continued improved can be carried out after the initial deadline for this piece of work.
Initial insights
Customer feedback
We regularly meet up with the CSC team to learn of any new or recurring issues being logged in their system and we uncovered a few issues related to Heart of Steel. Its was evident that the main issue impacting the CSC team was amount of incoming calls for engraving 2 dates, which was working out to be around 28 calls and this required a dedicated employee to handle these requests.
“ I worked out that in one month it was taking up one full time person to deal with these”
This was definitely something we felt needed improving, not only would it benefit the business but also the user and therefore became the main focus for this piece of work.
deeper insights
Reviewing existing functionality
I evaluated the current functionality which allowed the addition of 1 date as optional. I noticed that the character limit presented was already taking into account the date.
What if the user didn’t want to include a date? I felt like they should still be able to use the full limit of characters, 50, for the name.
New character limit approach
Character limit of an engraving (this is with or without a date) : 50
Adding a date takes up 11 characters (including a space), 02-02-2020. This reduced the character count for the name to 39
Adding a second date takes up another 11 characters, reducing the characters available for the name to 23.
SessionCam analysis
I reviewed mobile recordings of the live site which had high struggle scores (4.6) and made note of any user pain points or struggle. Next, we arranged these findings into 2 categories; Copy/content or Functionality in order to see what we could improve with or without development.
Ideating
Sketching ideas for the engraving 2 dates
I sketched out potential different solutions for adding 2 dates with an engraving name, which allowed me to quickly share with the team and gain feedback to iterate on these. This then allowed us to decide which solution we want to go ahead and user test.
Ideally, I would have liked to get the team involved in sketching and coming up with solutions themselves, but this proved difficult. However still keeping them in the loop and getting their feedback is important to understand what is technically feasible from a build and time perspective.
Research
User testing
For the user testing I decided to build the chosen solution in Axure because it allowed me to apply the complex logic needed for recreating the experience of entering customer details and dates within a form, something which is difficult to achieve with Invision.
We conducted five 40-60 minute remote user testing sessions. Participants were given scenarios and task to follow, testing the live site and the engraving 2 dates prototype.
Key insights from the user testing:
When editing an engraving from 2 dates to 1 date his initial expectation was to just delete a date rather than go back to change engraving type.
The participant expected the dates to be optional instead of having to go back and change the type of engraving.
More sketching
Let’s iterate
With this in mind we quickly got together and iterated the solution we had and as team we come up with a new solution with the developers proving input on how feasible it would be and this is what we ended up with.
I find it beneficial to have key team members take part in the user testing sessions as I believe It’s really important for them to get involved to hear and understand the user pain points and it also helps the team have the same understanding when iterating on the solutions.
THE REDESIGN
2 dates
Our approach was to make the process of adding and removing 2 dates to an engraving as simple as possible by minimising the amount of steps as user would need to through. Listening to the users feedback and applying that to improve the solution we tested was valuable to reach our end design.
Conclusion
The impact
The implementation of this functionality has had a huge impact, not only for the business but also for the users. Feedback from the CSC team is that calls have reduced from 28 to 2 a month. However, since launch we have continued monitoring the user experience and there still seems to be some challenges when engraving a name.