KWF Collecte.
2023
The challenge.
KWF is a Dutch charity dedicated to fighting cancer. It’s the largest charity in the Netherlands in terms of funds raised. One of its main propositions is the yearly ‘KWF Collecte’, a week in September when across the country people take to the streets to raise money for KWF.
In 2022 KWF made the decision to digitise many of the collection processes that were formerly executed manually by local organizers. People could now – in theory – do everything from their own smartphone. In 2023 this culminated into the creation of a web-app to facilitate these processes. With a multi-disciplinary team and an agile process we worked in a race against the clock to launch a user-friendly and well-working MVP.
My role: Lead UX & UI Designer
The process.
Empathize.
KWF has been organizing the yearly collection week since 1950 and has a loyal following of volunteers. However, the digitization of many processes – which had already started to take shape in 2021 – have led many loyal collectors to feel frustrated. In 2022 we applied several research methods in order to learn about these frustrations. The goals was to pinpoint where we needed to make changes in order for people to feel good again about collecting.
Diary study
As the customer journey for the KWF Collecte extends over several months, and as we needed to get a better understanding of the frictions, milestones and touchpoints a volunteer experiences in this journey, we decided to set up a diary study surrounding the 2022 Collecte. We tracked volunteers in their activities by having them provided loggings of their collecte-related experiences through an online form.
We learned, among other things, that our participants were mainly engaged with the collection (1) around the moment they received communication about the app going live, and (2) in the days just before the collection week started. This may be related to disappointing (online) marketing results in the weeks leading up to the collection week – people did not seem to feel the urgency to take any action at that time.
Interviews & feedback survey
We reached out to specific target audiences by phone to inquire about their motivations. The people we spoke to included, for example, people who had participated in the KWF Collecte last year but had yet to respond this year. Coupled with a general feedback survey we send out right after the collection week in September, we gained several interesting insights, notably:
- The disappearance of (part of) the local collection organisation demotivated many respondents. They missed a piece of information, inspiration and/or the social aspect of the collection week this year.
- The prospect that many elderly people would not be able to donate (easily) due to the lack of a cash payment option demotivated many respondents.
- Those who previously participated as local organisers said that they were finding it difficult to find their place in the new system, where local organisers did not have a concrete role to fulfil. “Does my role actually still exist?”.
Focus group
The research surrounding the 2022 Collecte showed us that there was a clear need for a local point of contact to inform and motivate people. In addition, former organisers seemed likely to quit altogether if no organisational role would be available to them.
We needed to explore options to shape a new role for the local organiser. For this purpose we set up sessions with groups made up of former and current local organizers and influencial volunteers. The main goal was to learn about their motivations and frustrations and to discover what these type of users would want from the platform we wanted to create.
Define.
Persona’s
Bacause we had to build the patform to facilitate for collectors as well as for teamcaptains, and because we needed to take in mind serveral other variations in our population, we created personas to capture the differences in user needs and desires.
Each persona needed to indicate what this particular user group needs in order for them to (1) take the initiative to participate in the 2023 Collecte, and (2) be successful in their collection efforts.
We also included simple visual cues about their level of knowledge about the collection and their eomotion towards it (new collectors generally didn’t have the feelings of frustration that the more experienced volunteers had at this point). This was relevant for our communications- and content teams to take into account.
BMAP
We also plotted insights about a person’s choice whether or not to collect in 2022 on a Bahaviour Map (BMAP). This proved to be a powerful visual tool to help us understand why someone does or does not collect. The vertical axis indicates someone’s ‘motivation’, the will to collect. The horizontal axis indicates someone’s ‘ability’, the ability to collect (available time, location, physical and mental limitations, etc.).
A low motivation and/or ability will result in someone not collecting. Only when someone’s motivation and ability are high enough (top left of the activation threshold) it makes sense to send someone a prompt (e.g. an ad on Facebook with the aim of getting someone to sign up for a collection).
Low urgency (motivation) seems to have caused many people in 2022 to be situated at the bottom of the BMAP the moment they receive an email or were shown an add (prompt) from KWF. Older collectors experienced issues using the new technologies (lower ability), causing them to start more on the left in the map.
User stories & user flows
We already had an outline of the sitemap for the basic content pages on the platform (home, about, FAQ, etc.). The most challenging part was to build up the account pages and the actual main functionalities related to raising funds. To make sure we accomodated for all main user stories, we created user-story maps.
These maps served as a blueprint for the flows we had to create in our designs.
Ideate.
The personas, BMAP, and user story maps played an important role in providing us with a framework for identifying the areas that required improvement in 2023. They guided us along the way in aligninging our new collection platform with the needs and desires of our target groups.
Guided by these frameworks, I started sketching out several concrete ideas for the platform. There were multiple design challenges to tackle. Foe example: catering to the requirements of both the teamcaptain and the regular collector; and ensuring an intuitive flow for street selection.
Validate.
It goes without saying that proper validation was essential in this project. In the very early stages we bounced ideas around within our own delivery team. But as soon as we had some actual wireframes and user flows worked out in Figma, we started validating with our user groups.
Prototyping in Figma
I worked out five main user flows into high-fidelity and fully interactive prototypes. These were the most essential and/or potentially challenging flows for new users, including account creation, team management and street selection.
Usability testing
On multiple iterations we validated our ideas with the target audience, the teamcaptains and regular collectors. To keep the threshold low we often invited KWF colleagues to be our test participants. This turned out quite well as we had quite a varied group of colleagues, different age groups and different levels of knowledge and experience with the KWF Collecte.
We plotted our test observations onto a user journey visualization in FigJam. After each round of testing I sat together with our Product Owner to discuss what patterns we could detect in the observations and what priority we would give to different insights.
For all important insights I designed solutions to address it and created tickets in JIRA for the development team to pick it up. I was on close contact with the front-enders working on the project.
We are live.
Promising results
We launched the platform at the beginning of June and were encouraged by the surprisingly low number of help requests that our customer service department has received in the first couple weeks. Even though the number of registrations was higher than we expected. Speaking to several users make it clear to me that people generally experienced the platform as very user-friendly, apart from some interaction issues caused by technical malfunctions and weak page speed performance.
We keep monitoring usage by open communication with the customer service department, as well as by looking at session recordings to pro-actively spot potential issues.
What I would do different next time
I would probably not soon pick a diary study again as a research method for a period that stretches over such a long time period. The longevity of the stody made it quite hard to really monitor the responses and we often forgot to quickly follow-up on vague or very short responses. And participants simply forgot to mention things, because after a few days it was already not at all top-of-mind for them. For a possible next time, good to consider keeping only the collection week as the study period.
Our feedback survey was quite extensive with multiple open-ended questions. The Survey was on the long side, and we saw that respondents gave fairly extensive answers in the first open-ended question and increasingly shorter answers in the open-ended questions following that. Next time, I’d consider asking fewer questions and really prioritise only one or a couple specific topics.
We could have steered our focus group sessions more on just identifying underlying needs and desires. Instead, the conversation often got bogged down in participants listing specific features they wanted to see in the product, which was not what I needed.
