Suscrito - Design Thinking
UX/UI—
Forbes reported that Netflix added 15.8 millions of users just between February and March 2022 due to pandemics. Since then, digital subscriptions to all kinds of purposes are being more and more popular.
Almost all economical sectors have increased their efforts in maintaining and improving their customer loyalty strategy since 2020. In the same direction, we, users, have understood that services can’t be free forever and little payments have to be done to enjoy them. This has led us to accept monthly payments and free trials that eventually become in forgotten subscriptions that make us stay (and pay) longer than predicted. This way users end up paying unknown amounts of money because of those subscriptions they once made and never cancelled.
Do we, users, know how many platforms we are subscribed in? the money we pay for it monthly? are we aware of when all these free trials actually ended?
My team’s challenge was to help users quantify and visualize those hidden payments users may not know they were paying, as well as helping them remember to cancel their free plan before starting paying for it.
We used Design Thinking Methodology to find the best solution.
Research
First of all we implemented a Desk Research where we looked for apps based on the involved subjects such as finances, earnings or user in digital environments. After that, a netnography was made to join users’ opinions after experiencing those apps. Some of the most repeated comments were:
“I like that you can use a category filter to group and guarantee that I am not missing anything”
”The app doesn’t have alerts to know when my payments have to be made. I ended up paying some months after free trial”
”I liked the app but does it have a Spanish version?”
”It is difficult to visualize each subscription, I prefer logos better than names”
Once we had an overview of the comments, we did a benchmark with apps offering similar services to understand most popular features among users.
Thanks to this method, we got an idea about the scope we had to embrace. This gave us some points from where we could start, lack of features from other apps we should include. At the same time we wanted to understand users will beyond the apps they were already using.
We created a Google Forms survey where we asked users questions such us: how many app subscriptions they had monthly, if they knew the final amount they were paying or if they were sharing the bills with other members:
92 % of the users had an account in online platforms.
Only 16,3% were not paying any attention to the bill.
“Security”, “easy to use”, “attractive”, “free” (at least a part) were the most repeated terms.
Natalia, new in Madrid coming to start a new position right before the pandemics. She hasn’t been able to meet a lot of people due to the circumstances. She’s decided to use her earnings on online entertainment, listen to music at home and learn some new tools for the new job.
Ernesto, all of his life rushing and never staying at home for long, now he is working from home he has time to take care of himself. He is using now mindfulness apps, follows personal growth podcasts and listens to guided stretching online after breakfast.
Carlos, he loves good music, movies and all cultural events. He is studying so he is a continuous internships holder trying to earn some money to start the project of his dreams.
This analysis guided us to create some hypothetical “User Personas”. Here you can read a summary:
Using Natalia’s example, we developed a Customer Journey map. Starting from her early days in Madrid, going through all the Pain Points that make her decide to download the app and highlighting the moments of truth (MOT).
User
What we did next, was to sum up all we had collected to make ourselves a mindset from where we could make a first approach to our project.
After that, we started analyzing the pain points the user could go through. This is how we came across with the necessities and, therefore, the benefits Natalia would obtain thanks to our app usage.
Needs: Earn money, collect all the payments, erase not used apps
Pains: No money, keep paying after the free trial month, ignorance of payments in non tangible products
Benefits: Earnings, try new apps without fear of extra costs, share costs with friends.
Thanks to this matrix we could develop also an in-out study. Our app would have the following features:
Online subscription app
In spanish
Classification of subscriptions with tags chosen by the user.
Notification to user before the end of the free month trial.
Total costs dashboard with filters
More icons and generalized ones.
Shared costs information.
