Sub Buddy Case Study
You’re trying to get control over your budget, but there’s too many elusive payments being made for services you’ve entirely forgotten about! You made reminders and notes to cancel the free trials before their deadlines, but somehow the notes and reminders disappeared, and you end up paying for these services you don’t actually want. It seems like all of these subscription based payments were designed to confuse and elude you. You might ask yourself, “Is there anything that can help me manage these services?”
Sub Buddy is your subscription helper. Sub Buddy can automatically grab your subscription and free trial information directly from the services you’re subscribing to. After the information is added to your list, Sub Buddy will help you manage your subscriptions effortlessly with payment reminders, auto cancelation of free trials, and more. Take back control of your subscriptions with Sub Buddy.
Sub Buddy was created by myself as an app concept. The product was researched, ideated, designed, and tested by myself over the course of a month. The challenge of building a product by yourself is difficult, but I’m proud of what I accomplished. Although Sub Buddy remains a concept for now, I hope to continue to work on this project and perhaps push it to development in the future.
Now let’s talk about process.
The Challenge
To create a product that would help people gain control over their subscription based services.
Research
I conducted primary research through user interviews with a varying selection of participants. The people I interviews were screened through a Survey I created in order to find the candidates whom I believed would offer the best qualitative data for my research.
I acquired meaningful insights through these interviews, and realized that the problem was much more pervasive than I had originally though.
Personas
I was able to create personas based on the data, and used these profiles as guiding stars throughout the entire design process. The goal was to create human centered designs that would enrich and empower my users.
Ideation
In order to fulfill my personas’ needs, I needed to create a tool that would be able to do most of the work itself. I was envisioning an automated helper who could create reminders and even cancel services by themselves. The challenge with this idea would be not to give the tool more power than the user, and to keep the user in control.
Sketches
I quickly sketched out different possibilities for my solution. I based my ideas off of experiences I’ve had with other platforms and how their interactions are put together. I was looking for something simple, intuitive, and friendly.
Design
Building off of my sketches, and most importantly, the needs of my personas, I began to create wireframes for Sub Buddy. The architecture and app navigation needed to be clear even in the early stages of design. I implemented Gestalt principles from the very beginning of the process in order to achieve clarity of design throughout.
The first version of my wireframes were tested with the same group of interview participants as well as some fresh new perspectives. This gave me both a familiarized point of view as well as first-time impressions. After testing, it was clear that my design could be more effective and clear. I chose to move on to the high fidelity phase with these iterations in mind.
The High Fidelity Screens were designed using a style guide and component library created by yours truly. Adding color and depth allowed me to influence hierarchy and architecture in order to make my designs more intuitive and increase ease of use. These designs were further tested, and of course, further iterated.
Testing
My high fidelity designs were again tested by the same participants with a handful of new users to once again gain fresh perspective. They were also critiqued by my mentor, Osama Ghazal, who had great insights into the capabilities of the product which helped me push the bounds of what Sub Buddy was capable of.
These tests gave me many insights, more than I would be able to iterate on for the time being. I decided to select the two biggest issues and iterate on them first, leaving the rest for future development. Those two issues were the Results page, and the Cancellation process for a specific subscription.
Results Page
The results screen was vague and abstract, very much designed for myself by myself. I had forgotten to create this page for my personas! I quickly rebuilt the components that made up this page, and focused on clear, intuitive design while pushing my niche, abstract visuals into a submenu.
Cancellation
Of all the tasks in my rounds of testing, this task was the most difficult for users. I had thought that I left the cancel option in plain sight, but it was so far down the hierarchy and didn’t have enough affordances. Nobody ever found it! I decided to move the cancel option into the edit subscription menu, and to make it a different color (red, for danger!). I also implemented a clearer slider indicator to help users understand how this interaction was to go. This iteration was a huge success, and became one of the most delightful interactions for my participants!
Lessons Learned
- Always keep your users’ needs at the heart of your design. The moment you get complacent is the moment you begin designing for yourself!
- Sometimes the architecture and the hierarchy can’t be perfected until you reach the high fidelity phase, as color and depth add a tremendous amount of clarity.
- Just because your design seems clear to you does not mean it will work for everyone!
Future Implementations
- Login information for each service, never forget your Netflix password again!
- Shared services function, for that one subscription your whole family shares.
- Voice assistance, talk to Sub Buddy and make the management process quicker!
