EXPLORATION
Letting the ideas flow
With these insights, I brainstormed all kinds of concepts. I love getting really playful with it, even bringing some of my Game Design background into my ideation.
Banyan is a mindfulness community offering live guided sessions with teachers and other members.
I was the Lead Designer of this 25 person startup, leading research to ideation to branding to prototyping.
Even though there was clear value in the existing Premium membership, not many people were upgrading. Something had to change.
To understand why users weren’t upgrading to the premium membership, I led remote interviews and workshops to uncover their motivations and pain points.
The research revealed a key issue: the audience for Banyon were mindful practitioners, and thus deterred by the transactional language of the membership tiers. They wanted a sense of generosity and connection, not a product upsell.
With these insights, I brainstormed all kinds of concepts. I love getting really playful with it, even bringing some of my Game Design background into my ideation.
After testing the ideas on users, the Supporter Membership emerged victorious.
Members receive a badge symbolizing their contribution, reinforced by imagery of a growing sapling.
Static screens can only communicate so much. I made a high-fidelity prototype to share the whole story with my team and engineer buddies.
Around the time of this project, a large chunk of our engineering team was laid off, making the implementation challenging.
Fortunately, for every high-fidelity creation I make, I also craft an MVP, without motion and hi-fi interactons, which was able to be implemented.
In the few months proceeding, we kept both memberships operational, in a psuedo A/B test. Our key metric - Monthly Conversion Rate - over the next several months was 15% higher with the new membership push. Woo!
