Scrunch

I wore three hats while building this product. It was a time of intense learning concerning business strategy and identity at Scrunch. Here are my roles in this project:

01Brand Strategy

Worked in close collaboration with the founders: scheduled weekly planning meetings and follow-ups to understand business and user requirements, define priorities and understand product goals.

02Brand Identity

Used design methods and co-creation workshops to identify opportunities and transform them into easy-to-use solutions. Created the interface design and collaborated with the engineering team to develop the product in regular sprints.

03User Experience

Business requirement gathering, user interviews, brainstorming, wireframing, interactive design, rapid prototyping, usability testing, cognitive walkthroughs.

Scrunch is a data-driven influencer marketing platform with one of the largest influencer databases. Scrunch primarily focuses on connecting brands and agencies for their marketing campaigns.

The platform aims at removing the fuss from collaborations and guarantees maximum ROI for brands, agencies, and influencers using data-driven insights to make marketing magic.

Distributed Teams

I work from Mumbai, India while Scrunch is based out of Brisbane, Australia. Collaborating with people that are continents apart is super fun but also challenging.

The Problem

Scrunch is visibly a well-established platform with over 20 million profiles and billions of data points growing since 2013. Knowing that Scrunch has an expansive repository of influencers, I had to devise a solution that best represented their data in a way that is tasteful and usable. Clearly structuring this data was key, such that brands/agencies can easily connect with the best-fit influencers for their campaigns.

The Need

Not only does the platform drive collaborations between influencers and agencies, but it also aims to educate influencers and agencies through their online program, Scrunch University. The site they had initially wasn’t quite aligned with the brand’s ideals:

1. 01Zestful
2. 02Structured
3. 03Informative

Scrunch previously worked with a design agency for their initial setup. I was brought into the picture much further down the road when the stakeholders wanted to revive their brand identity and better the app’s usability. At this point, my goal was to identify the gaps and missing pieces.

My strategy was to get all the knowledge transferred from the previous agency, alongside connecting with the sales and customer service team to get myself well-acquainted with the needs and frustrations of Scrunch’s userbase. This gave a concise view of the grey areas. On knowing the points missed out or incorrectly posed, I could now map my sprint journey to confidently tackle them.

I optimized the sprint week, deciding to kick off on Monday, as we had different time zones. Also, I combined the ideation and decision phases on Tuesday, concentrating two days on prototyping. Thus we'd have a more complete prototype to bring more insights and a clearer path to follow. Based on the testing and feedback, I could then go back and iterate on the last day, before getting on with the loop again.

Projects are different by nature - different contexts, users, and businesses. I believe that if we apply the same process for every problem, then there is a fear of missing out on important points or doing busy work.

1. 01List of Sprint Goals
2. 02Expert Interview
3. 03How Might We’s
4. 04Affinity Mapping

1. 01Problem Overview
2. 02Brainstorming Session
3. 03Crazy 8’s
4. 04Solution Sketch

1. 01User Journey
2. 02Storyboarding
3. 03Rapid Prototyping

1. 01Usability Testing
2. 02Feedback
3. 03Iteration

List of Sprint Goals

Through a list of sprint goals, one can rephrase assumptions and obstacles into questions. This enables me to think of solutions in terms of sketches, storyboards, and prototypes.

Crazy 8’s

Sketching 8 distinct ideas in 8 minutes, as text, images, or illustrations. From the ideas generated, I would then branch out to find plausible solutions and jot them down for affinity mapping.

How Might We’s

We reframed the problems we heard as “How might we…” questions, then grouped the notes by theme through affinity mapping to see which opportunities mattered most.

Solution Sketch

After a walkthrough of the affinity mapping notes and the HMWs, I formulated designs that gave more shape and meaning to all the sessions above.

The majority of my visual design work centered around crafting a familiar and delightful experience for our users. The design direction was based on earlier market research. The new brand visuals aimed to uplift our platform and give it a new personality.

I created a semi-structured user-testing script with testing scenarios based on each week's tasks to guide the testing sessions with users. The success metrics were success/failure rates to perform each task of the script. I remotely conducted user testing sessions with the client's known user base and used the feedback to reiterate screens. This approach had a downside, which I explain in the Learnings and Insights section below.

During the testing phase of a new feature roll-out, I came across a point that wasn't taken into consideration previously.

Most social media users these days have multiple handles. However, when I initially designed the tab for social media profile claims, I did so taking only one account per person into consideration. Quickly then, I added a button to allow users to verify and claim multiple profiles on various platforms. Here’s how we approached the problem earlier, and the final screens after user testing:

After the sprint, we had the iteration week, where I improved the prototype to be retested with users. Then we defined the roadmap for the MVP and prioritized the backlog.

The stakeholders, engineers, and I collaborated in two-week iterations (Scrum) and built the MVP with the core experience in three months. Since then, we have run weekly iterations, which help us to improve existing features or to introduce new ones.

01What I Would Do Differently

With visitors coming in from more than 100 countries daily, I would like to reach out to people from more demographics; right now we only focus on our main markets, i.e. the USA, China, Australia, and India.

02A/B Tests Could Run Longer

Our A/B tests ran for a couple of weeks. Given more time, we could better analyze the most suitable layout for our users.

03Performance Metrics

• 56.46%increase in trial conversion rate

  Scrunch observed a 56.46% increase in sign-ups from the 7-day free trial to the paid plans.

• 18%month-on-month traffic growth

  Scrunch received 18% more visitors each month, expanding the user base to 20k+ active users.

• 69.5%system usability scale score

  Users averaged a score of 69.5 on the SUS questionnaire.