TR

A strategic approach
to mobile app design

We designed an ever-interactive and immensely customizable mobile experience for Denebunu, a unique platform that is allowing its users to explore, try out and give feedback on new products.

About the project

Denebunu, a platform that is not only creating value for users but also brands that they are in collaboration with wants to continue doing so on a global scale. Denebunu has approached SHERPA with a seemingly hefty ask that in reality falls right into one of SHERPA’s areas of expertise: taking the current user experience one step further and designing a mobile experience.

At the end of our collaboration, we have created a profoundly interactive Denebunu mobile experience that is geared specifically for each user’s needs, guiding them through the benefits of the brand. This allowed Denebunu to not only take huge steps in becoming the one key player in its realm nationally but it also paved the way for becoming a trailblazer globally.

The problem

It is completely fair to say that Denebunu has a unique win-win-win business model where they provide value for their users and brands they collaborate with while remaining for-profit. In the world in which we live where getting insights on your target audience is the most valuable currency, Denebunu accomplishes to execute an immense hyper-targeting approach with the perceived and real benefit of allowing their users to try out new products and share their experiences with them. This in return provides the platform, hence the brands they collaborate with, with a vast amount of granular information on their target audience and means to improve on their line of products.

When we kicked off the project, Denebunu users’ only way of coming across the benefits they are provided with was via the website since there was not yet a mobile app. After having delved into a Discovery phase as SHERPA, we have found out several outstanding issues with the current Denebunu user experience:

  1. Website not providing a satisfactory level of usability hence failing to a certain extent to deliver the intended benefits to the user.
  2. Website falling short in clearly explaining the benefits and how the service ecosystem works.
  3. Denebunu experience pivoting solely around the free sample boxes causing dissatisfaction with users not receiving one and making them lose interest in the platform altogether.
  4. Not-so-well staged scenarios when it comes to providing users with time-sensitive information and getting their feedback in dire situations.
  5. The profile survey, which is a whopping six-page long form, not being thought through in a way that will guide users to accomplish this task easily, which might make this step a tedious one rather than one that will eventually benefit them.

We have based all our following activities on these pillars which we have identified together with Denebunu in order to come up with a coherent experience strategy to be followed up by an end-to-end mobile user experience.

SHERPATH
SHERPATH, SHERPA design methodology.

The strategy

A strategy without a clear understanding of business goals and the current pain points of its stakeholders would be a futile one. Acknowledging this motto, SHERPA facilitated a workshop to not only to kick off the project but to get the grander project team in one virtual room together too. During this workshop teams got aligned on the scope and goals of this project which gave each attendee a clearer understanding on how the process ahead will go on. All parties have left this very workshop rightfully tired but more importantly, with the confidence that the problems to be tackled have been framed and prioritized.

Next stop on the exploration journey was tapping into user data and analytics that we at SHERPA call Funnel Analysis. During this, key data such as visitor to user conversion rates and survey completion behaviours have been analysed then reported. In parallel, in order to make sure we would end up solving real users’ problems and to be able to have a language to communicate with Denebunu better, we have conducted a persona workshop during which we put the power of data into use and matched the insights from the Funnel Analysis, plus our previous findings with four target persona groups. This workshop allowed us to personify our users, prioritize them as well as their problems and gave us clearer insights on which pain points to dig deeper into.

Following the exploration step came along the phase where SHERPA put together a strategic approach to the project. With our go-to UX Strategy Blueprint framework we have established the four pillars of Denebunu strategy:

  • 💬A review-based user experience SHERPA, in the light of findings from the exploration phase, turned the focus of the whole experience from obtaining free samples to the consumption of invaluable user reviews allowing Denebunu to increase user conversion rates as well as the frequency of user interactions. This way the users’ inclination towards completely getting turned off from the experience when they realize they are not receiving samples right away have been addressed. In order to ensure the quality and constancy of user reviews, gamification was used.
  • ✨“Made for you” approach One of Denebunu’s strongest suits is the indisputable fact that they know their users very well. SHERPA doubled down on this by allowing Denebunu users to have a highly personalized & tailor-made experience.
  • 💡Holding users’ hands at each step Clearing out any doubts on how something in any given moment during the experience works and virtually guiding them towards what they need from the get go has been another aspect and guiding principle that SHERPA has built the Denebunu experience onto. With the progressive onboarding approach, users are safely being welcomed into the process, step by step.
  • 🗒️New form experience Sometimes strength can turn into weakness if not handled properly. Denebunu not only really knows their users and keeps tabs on them, but as a prerequisite to do so, requires its users to fill out rather lengthy forms. In order to add minimum amount of cognitive load to the user, SHERPA has designed a more organic, conversational and natural form experience that makes the sometimes-tedious process of filling out surveys, more enjoyable and frictionless.

As for the cherry on top, SHERPA has established the content strategy along with the brand voice going hand in hand with these four pillars.

From strategy to interface

With the strategy box checked out, it is easy to spiral out with the number of ambitious needs and wants. Working within the timeframe of our client Denebunu, we knew exactly how to avoid this pitfall: create an inventory to help us crystalize how exactly strategy would be embodied into the interface in terms of content and features. For that,we rolled our sleeves and created a user story mapping canvas with all possible actions that can be taken by users to help us create an information architecture & content map that is coherent with the focal areas of the experience as well as one that allows for easy navigation and accessibility.

Last on the conceptual stages but not least, we have gamified sharing reviews and filling out surveys to ensure users are motivated to complete these tasks and they get an extra joy out of them.

Samplico Badges Samplico Badges
Samplico Badges

Minimal and organic design. Terms like these often mean different things in our minds. Knowing this, to avoid any buzzwords getting in the way of our creation process, SHERPA has conducted a Design Insights Workshop during which we have not only done a quick crash course on basic visual design terminology to get on the same page with things like color, typography, iconography and other visual elements of an app, but we also discovered what Denebunu was hoping their mobile app to look and feel like, and more importantly, why. The Design Insights Workshop gave SHERPA more than enough insights and tools to get a clear, concise idea on the visual direction to be taken and to create a moodboard to shake hands on with Denebunu following the workshop. The workshop not only aided SHERPA going from the conceptual stages to a more concrete UI design stage but helped both Denebunu and SHERPA make some critical decisions early in the process hence gave the project team a huge boost in morale.

Further into designing the user interface, focal points that we have established gave us an ironclad confidence in our decision making when it came to making the calls that influence the entire user experience. For example our review-based user experience approach led us to fashion a main home feed with other users’ reviews. Going deeper into our decision making processes on this focal point, users were given the chance to add photos in their reviews, and certain aspects of consumption and sharing of reviews have been enhanced and gamified.

To underline the approach where we wanted the users to feel like the whole experience has been made for them, users were given the option to pick a theme of their liking upon landing on the app for the first time. The “made for you” approach was not solely in the aesthetics sense but also in terms of content and usability. Users were shown reviews only matching their profile just like surveys would only meet them if they related to them.

Denebunu Mobile App Themes
Themes
Denebunu Mobile App Themes
Themes

Similarly the notifications were designed in a way that the user has utmost control over what they get notified on while guiding them to not miss out on things like free sample boxes. In addition, users were given even more incentive to both review products and engage with the app by showing them how their reviews are being rated and interacted with by other users.

As SHERPA we believe in the power of collaboration combined with experimentation. When it was time to localize the Denebunu mobile app for the UK market, upon research and brainstorming within the team, we devised a new workflow to ensure maximum efficiency in this translation phase without discounting on quality.

Using the Ditto plug-in, we managed to take some considerable steps in optimizing the localization process. First we extracted all the frames from Figma, our main interface design tool at SHERPA, into Ditto. Then we shared the Ditto link with our translator so they could export it into the good old Excel and get translating while being able to do a context-check with Ditto. Upon reviewing the translations, with the Ditto plug-in, it only was a matter of hitting a button to get all the translations be updated as the content into the screens that we had designed. This experimentation saved us and our client a bunch of time and resources and allowed the development team at Denebunu to get their hands on the UK version way quicker.

And now, without further ado, the Denebunu Mobile App is live! As SHERPA we feel proud to have worked on this remarkable project. We believe that Denebunu, now with the mobile app experience, will continue to bring joy to their users and become a cutting edge, one of a kind platform, globally.

Barış Yeşilçiçek
Barış Yeşilçiçek

CTO & Co-founder

Worked with SHERPA on the experience design of Denebunu's highly anticipated mobile app which had been a long time coming. Not only they have delivered this initial promise, but they also went above and beyond by introducing new points of view and approaching the project both from a product perspective and one that prioritizes the user. Their inputs on the strategic standpoint have been invaluable, overall surpassing our already high expectations.