In November 2023, General Assembly tasked us with the student project of increasing the amount and quality of donations to St. Vincent de Paul, Australia. Vinnies is ubiquitous with Australian retail and seemed to have a constant supply of goods for the thrifty shopper. Yet revenue was slipping as competitors encroached on quality donations and sales.
How could we turn this around for Vinnies?
Housekeeping
Timeline
November 4 - December 2, 2023
Market and user research
Research synthesis
Prototype development
User testing
My Roles
Nicholas Sangster
Donna Feng
Jeff Clarke
Team
Donors do not sense the impact of their clothing donations
THE PROBLEM
THE SOLUTION
A way for donors to sense the impact of their clothing donations
ASSUMPTION MAPPING
Identifying why Vinnies wasn’t getting the amount and quality of donations they were seeking
Preparing for a research sprint, we had to identify the way that people donate and shop at Vinnies in order to attract better donations and increase interest and sales.
We mapped out our assumptions as researchers in the problem space and came out with three important unknowns to be addressed in our research:
People want greater education about the benefits of donating
People don’t know what they can donate
People don’t know how their donations benefit others and cannot measure how their donations benefit others
RESEARCH GOALS
Identifying our ‘important unknowns’ allowed us to create a targeted research plan
We drafted a research plan confident that we had identified the areas we needed to research in our assumption map.
Users
How people donate items: when, to whom and the reasons why
Understand second hand purchasing habits
Discover any pain points/frustrations when donating/purchasing
Understand the way charity stores accept and sell donations
Stakeholders
Who are we targeting?
People that purchase pre loved items
People that donate to Op Shops
People that donate in general
Owners or staff of charity organisations
SECONDARY RESEARCH AT A GLANCE
Where was Vinnies sitting in the market?
Reviewing their respective annual reports, market research identified that Vinnies’s revenue was far behind the market leader, Salvos, at approx 4:1 ratio
Source: Vinnies Annual Report 2021/22; Salvation Army Annual Report 2021/22
COMPETITOR/COMPARATOR ANALYSIS
Vinnies’s usability measured against their competitors
As part of our research sprint we completed a competitor/comparator analysis of Vinnies’s website. We aimed to understand the tone of the UX copy as directed at donors. We also checked for style consistency throughout pages.
Vinnies
Pluses
A well established brand/wide reach
Easy to use and find store locator
Deltas
A lot of information without clear call to actions
Difficult to identify what specific shops accept as donations
Education about donating is difficult to locate
Salvos
Pluses
Multiple ways to purchase items online.
Downloadable donation guide
Ability to post and get donations picked up
Deltas
A lot of information without clear call to actions
Difficult to identify what specific shops accept as donations
Education about donating is difficult to locate
Red Cross
Pluses
Provides tips for decluttering
Breakdown of causes and how to donate to them are clear
Partnerships with retailers & provides discounts in store
Deltas
Donate goods page is text heavy & hard to scan
Savers
Pluses
“Thrift Proud” section, information and testimonials about repurposing
Provides a discount incentive for donating
Decluttering tips and infographics
Deltas
Only a small percentage of money goes to Non-Profits
Life Blood
Pluses
Education about benefits/importance of donating is showcased
Good initiatives e.g. Donate as a group
Information is broken down clearly sections and dot points
Deltas
Process of donating seems to be out of order, not logical
STRATEGIC PLANNING AND MANAGEMENT
Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, and Threats
A SWOT analysis helped identify how Vinnies sat in the charity retail landscape at the time. Using a conventional framework while developing a novel product helped ground us that the direction we were taking the product in was correct.
CONTEXTUAL INQUIRIES
Visiting Vinnies stores provided context
As part of our research plan we included contextual inquiries to Vinnies stores and competitor charities stores. The purpose of this was to gain a better understanding of the day-to-day operations of Vinnies in-situ.
Vinnies stores use size/price tags as an additional way of showing causes they are engaged with
Vinnies uses bins with signage to accept clothing donations, which Vinnies volunteers then sort
Vinnies stores use signage to communicate directions regarding acceptance of donations
Vinnies mostly operates like traditional brick-and-mortar retail business, although the operations are vastly different and dictated by the second-hand nature of business
RESEARCH + RESEARCH SYNTHESIS
Donors have big hearts
We interviewed 17 donors with the following research goals:
How they donate items: when, to whom and reasons why
How they go about purchasing second-hand goods
What their pain points/frustrations were when donating/purchasing
Overwhelmingly, there was apathy and uncertainty about what the community benefit was to donating clothes. Although people knew that charities sought donations and were overall good for the community, they did not understand the impact of their donating at one charity against another. They also did not have any idea about the processes the charities had in place to turn donations into a community benefit. The insights we developed in our affinity map put us on track when considering our empathy map.
INSIGHTS FROM RESEARCH SYNTHESIS
People do not know how their donations help
PERSONA DEVELOPMENT
Using an Empathy Map to create our persona
We took the insights and behaviours from our affinity map and created an empathy map with these in mind. The persona was becoming more real the more we looked at it.
“I want to know more about how my donations are processed”
“What happens to my donations?”
“I would like to know more about the impact of my donations”
“I donate when I need to declutter”
PERSONA
Clare, The Indiscriminate Donor
Using our empathy map and with constant reference to our affinity map, we developed our primary persona, Clare. She decluttered her wardrobe seasonally. She wanted to help others with her donations. Alas she would drop her donations to the nearest charity bin, as she could not differentiate how one charities mission was better than another’s and would defer to the most convenient option. This led to frustrations around charity transparency - she wondered how she could do more to help those she cared about most.
We placed Clare in the donation journey and found that she mostly felt anxiety and negative emotions around tracking the impact of her donations. Once she had dropped her donations to a charity, how was she to know how they benefited others?
Finding the opportunity in Clare’s donation journey
PAINPOINTS IN CLARE’S USER JOURNEY
PROBLEM STATEMENT
Where did the opportunity lie?
We examined a number of problem statements around the tracking stage of Clare’s journey map, as it was where she was dropping off clothes to charity and experiencing negative emotions and behaviours. Any problem statement we used needed to address the client brief while also addressing the negative emotions Clare was experiencing when donating.
We considered the first problem statement (1 below) and associated HMW statements before dropping them: it was almost impossible to gain a metric around donor trust in charity. Our solution had to be more grounded in behaviour than sentiment around charity trust.
Clare needs more transparency around the donation process because she doesn’t trust charity organisations when she is decluttering and donating
Clare needs to know how charities use her donations to help others because she wants to declutter by donating unwanted items to charities
Clare needs to know how her donations impact others because she wants her donations to go to a good cause
With this in mind, and after a lot of consideration, we developed the following problem statement:
Clare needs to know how charities use her donations because she wants to help others by donating unwanted items
We examined the problem space and the problem statement that most reflected the research that had gone into developing our persona. We went back and forth with our affinity map to ensure our problem statement hadn’t drifted from our user research.
We finally understood that Clare needs to know how charities use her donations because she wanted to help others by donating unwanted items. How might we motivate Clare to be less apathetic about donating.
STAKEHOLDER INTERVIEWS TO CLARIFY GOALS BEFORE IDEATION
“90% of our staff are volunteers, maybe two or three casual workers and a manager who gets paid”
Vinnies had tasked us with understanding their customers and looking for opportunities to attract better donations and increase sales. Our solution needed to tie in Clare’s problems and Vinnies and while being accessible to Vinnies’s retiree workforce. Although we felt we had an area we could address for Clare and was inside the problem space, we recognised the potential to create a solution at disconnect with the realities of a charity business. A round of stakeholder interviews revealed what we had suspected.
Charities spend a lot of time sorting through and disposing of poor quality items at the cost of funds raised
The majority of in-store charity workers are retiree volunteers who are not as tech-literate as our persona
Knowing about stakeholder limitations allowed us to ideate with expectations adjusted
We were ready to commence ideation knowing the business needs, the stakeholders limitations, and with a firm grasp of the pain points our persona was experiencing. Any solution we came up with would need to be accessible not only for our tech-literate persona, but also for the retiree workforce of Vinnies’s stores.
Round one of ideation: the trap of addressing feelings rather than behaviour
IDEATION
With our pencils loaded we began the process of ideating on how might we motivate Clare to be less apathetic about donating, quickly recognising we were going off track with this how-might-we, as the ideas it was generating were broad and unfocused:
Focus on the local impact, no matter how small her donation
Gamify the system and move up levels each time you donate
Allocate donations to a particular family/people in need and track their progress
This problem statement encompassed both trust and transparency. We had recognised the pitfalls of addressing trust, a difficult sentiment to measure, and yet we had begun ideating on motivating clare to be less “apathetic about donating”, another attitudinal metric that was not behaviour based. What’s more, this how-might-we did not address our problem statement!
After one round of ideation we recognised that this was not going to be a simple matter and dropped the ideas we had developed and went back to develop a new how-might-we.
We went back to the problem statement and really considered where the issue was for Claire and whether this was addressable in a more tangible way.
I want to take a moment here to emphasise what a tremendous effort this was for three relatively inexperienced students. We spent days considering how-might-we statements, making minor adjustments to a variety of seemingly equal statements and stretching our brains in ways we never had before. Minor tweaks of words or orders of sentences rippled through us as we considered the future consequences of choosing the wrong how-might-we. We even sought help through generative AI, which spat out useless how-migth-we statements but helped inspire and hone our own.
It was clear that we were at a point of no return, and our how-might-we needed to reflect our primary research. Finally, we drafted a how-might-we that we felt confident we could address. How might we inform Clare about how charities use her donations to impact others?
Round two of ideation: standing on solid ground
How might we inform Clare about how charities use her donations to impact others?
Standing on solid ground, we quickly ideated three feature that together formed some solution that we could build upon.
QR code scan and register an account and receive notifications
Offer opportunities to donate to specific causes
Tracking of donations
WIREFLOWS
Making MyVinnies a reality
Clare would scan a QR code in-store through which she could create her MyVinnies account
Once she had created an account, she would scan a second QR code to get points for her donation
From there, she could allocate her donated points to Vinnies causes that resonated with her
She could view points earned and causes she had donated to in her history
We created a sketched wireflow to map out the processes we had created during ideation.
THEORETICAL TESTING
Were our ideas going to work for Clare?
We reviewed our idea against behavioural scientist BJ Fogg’s behaviour model.
According to his formula B = MAP, Clare was likely to donate [(B)ehaviour] when (P)rompted as she was both high in (A)bility to donate and was (M)otivated to donate to help others.
In essence, MyVinnies would prompt Clare to donate.
SITEMAPPING / CONTENT STRATEGY
We opted for developing MyVinnes as a web app since it offered a more cost-effective solution. Our concept involved Clare bringing her donation bag to the Vinnies store, where an employee would prompt her to scan a QR code linking to the MyVinnes web app.
Where would MyVinnies fit on the Vinnies website?
To ensure seamless integration, we mapped out the existing Vinnies website and strategically positioned our web app within the top-level navigation. This placement not only made it easily discoverable but also accessible via QR code in-store for user convenience.
Alternate flow from scanning QR code in store, the user could login to their MyVinnies account on the website
Prototype one: usability testing & user feedback
DEVELOPMENT
Prototype two: final usability considerations
FINAL PROTOTYPE
Hi-Fidelity MVP
Working MVP
NEXT STEPS
How we would continue MyVinnies’s growth
Although we have developed an MVP we believe addresses the problem space and Vinnie’s business needs, there are many areas we can see in future development. These range from additional MVP features to pivoting away and developing entirely new products.
Create and implement the MyVinnies flow from the current website, ensuring users can access their account via the website home pag
Timeline infographic indicating progress of the users journey through donating to a specific cause
Share your donations on socials to inspire others and further expand on ways to inspire others to join MyVinnies through socials integration — relating
to our persona behaviour
Explore through further research and ideation ways to build trust in charity organisations, as another trend in our research was lack of trust in larger charity organisations
Potential to track large value items as they go through the donation process
User research informed us that there is a lack of trust in charity organisations. Although we considered trust to be an area unsuitable for MVP development, as it is not behaviour based, it may be worth conducting more research on in the future. Importantly, we believe we have found the major problem Vinnies donors are experiencing — we can use our strong research in future developments to promote Vinnies mission to serve others.
Reflections and Lessons learned
REFLECTIONS
The time that passed between beginning and finishing the project felt both shorter and longer than the regular passing of time. Shorter perhaps because we stayed in good contact after the project and felt like we were trying to relive the project. Longer perhaps because the project had changed how I understood user experience design and perhaps even myself. I had grown.
I remember saying to Jeff and Donna at the beginning that I wanted us to produce work that we could be proud of. Upon completion we could all say we had all been a part of something we were proud of and had produced work that we were satisfied reached toward our potential at the time.
Above: Dropshadow Blur Specialists Downunder consisted of Nicholas Sangster (top right), Jeff Clarke (middle), and Donna Feng (top left)
It will be our teamwork that will leave a lasting impression on me. We had enjoyed the project, with plenty of jokes and fun mixed in with thoughtful and considered UX work. Although the sheen of the work we produced will wear off as we develop our skills and elevate our work to a higher standard, we found a way to work as a team that, for me, will set a standard I wish to achieve in the future. Thank you, Jeff and Donna.