An H5 website created to allow LePur Yogurt fans to submit and vote on their new flavor and products. “H5” is a term that stands for the mobile version of websites opened in mobile browsers.
LePur Yogurt Crowdsourcing
Overview
LePur is a China-based startup firm focused on producing high-quality fresh yogurt. Embracing a digital marketing strategy, it expanded quickly and reached around one million consumers within three years. Distinguished itself from traditional brick-and-mortar yogurt retailer, LePur tailors its sales channels via WeChat, a multi-functional Chinese messaging app to communicate with consumers directly. As a member of the User Operation Department, I was tasked to design a novel strategy to help product marketing to develop new products and new flavors with a strong emphasis on consumer feedback.
My Role
As the project coordinator, I developed the initial concept and defined a path to the solution that can potentially accelerate new product offerings. Not only did I organize a cross-function group to crystallize the idea and develop the website for Crowdsourcing, but also I designed the interactive prototype and user flow chart. In addition, I establish the basic criteria for measuring user preference and decision making.
The Challenge
Founded in 2014, LePur is one of the fastest-growing yogurt firms in China's consumer food and beverage sector. To survive from its initial growth stage and emerge from fierce competition, Not only is it crucial for LePur to keep developing new products to expand its consumer bases but also every new product has to be popular and become a big seller.
So, our high-level goals were to
-
Reduce new product development time and increase sales
-
Collect sufficient data on consumer's preference to ensure successful product launch
The team
I organized a cross-functional project team that consist of Xin Liu, a Visual designer, Jia Jia, a client-side Software engineer, and Xiaobo Wang, a Backend Java Developer to create the website.
My Tasks:
-
Research, information analysis
-
Interview consumer for Insights & Ideation
-
Design solution
-
Drawing website progress and prototype
Design Process
Discovery
As the project leader to bring the feature to fruition, the first thing I did was to conduct stakeholder interviews within the company. For example, I met with the product development team to understand technical constraints of existing production process and came up with actionable responses.
Fan
Vise Director
Innovation Department
Jin
Product Innovation Manager
Xiayang
Product Innovation Manager
Stakeholders Want to Speed up Development Process
Which process is the most important part of a new product?
- concept development is the most important process because a popular concept will lead to high sales.
Which process do you think it costs most of the time? Why?
- Creating a new formulation to make a perfect taste takes a lot of time.
- It's hard to collect and leverage a large amount of customer data to make informed decisions to develop innovative yogurt products.
Original Development Process is Too Long (16-20 weeks)
The average of LePur's Product Life Cycle is 16-20 weeks long. The innovation department was struggling with finding enough information to decide the direction of new product formulation. Having more consumer data and feedback are necessary and crucial for a new product launch.
The Orginal Produce Life Circle System
In our previous experience, LePur's loyal fans often offer many wonderful and creative ideas related to new yogurt favor and product form on our official website. We wonder if we can invite and motivate these fans to join our early product development process.
To confirm this, we interviewed over 160 consumers who have purchased Lepur yogurt over three times with a half year. The age range of them varies from 18 to 45 years old.
P.S. This consumer interview was teamwork with assistance from LePur's User Operate Department. Fifteen team members helped me to collect the consumer's opinions. They are Sarah Tian, Tianrou Kong, Shengci Li, Yu Liu, Fan Xia, Luying Chen, Tian Xiao, Diyang Li, Wenhao Cai, Ming Xiao, Wei Shan, Jiaxi Li, Xue Cheng, and Yuhan Li.
162
Survey
Responses
65%
Have joined LePur's Online activities
80%
Used to check
LePur's new
products or favors
Further Insight
200 calls were made, 81% of consumers provided feedback to us. A common characteristic of these customers is that they are Loyal Fans of LePur Products, who purchased LePur products multiple times, and they are willing to spend time in following and trying out a new LePur product.
In addition, LePur has over one million consumers; extreme active consumers are 3-5% so that we were confident with the concept, which encourages consumers to join in LePur's early product development process.
The Solution
Crowdsourcing Project
It's a website based on the H5 page. LePur fans can easily vote for their favorite choice and even offer their own ideas. The new idea that won at least 3,000 users' votes will be developed by LePur.
3,000 votes are calculated by us to manage financial risk due to time and money investment in the development process and mass-production. This data also helps the company to predict the new product's sales in the future.
So, what will voters gain?
- A coupon equal to ¥15.
- The consumer whose proposal is accepted by LePur will become a VIP of LePur, 20% off in every purchase, for one year.
User flow & Functions
With clear ideas and goals, I designed several basic functions for users to interact. After users open the website, they can scroll to choose a concept they loved, to vote it and gain the coupon. The main task is simple and clear for users.
Not only can users vote for their favorite choice proposed by LePur's innovation department, but also they are offered an opportunity to share their own idea if they desire.
Flow Chart
I evaluated different scenarios such as how to make new users understand what they should do when they enter this website; when twhat they can do next after finishing the vote, etc. I draw the flow chart which helped me to think more comprehensively before the prototype was done.
Prototype
Based on the project goal and flow chart, I designed the prototype allowing us to test: information architecture, layout, visual hierarchy, and interactive elements.
Homepage
Description Page (After Voted)
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Comments Page
Back Page
Add Payment
Add Payment Information
User Profile - Backed
User Profile - Liked
User Profile - My concept
Create a concept
Upload images
Successfully Created
Share concept
Likes & Comments
Users can save the concept they like and leave comment on the discussion section.
Payment
The process of after users click 'back it'. They will be asked to upload their payment informastion.
Post & Share
Under user file, they are offered an opportunity to share their own idea if they desire.
Design Decisions
Through the theory of Gustave Le Bon, a popular French psychologist, who says in his book《 The crowd: A study of the popular mind 》, an individual‘s mind would be impacted by the community. We didn't want consumers' choices to be affected by others. In our case, we designed not to show the number of votes to consumers before they vote, instead, we display the votes until they vote.
No progress and votes numbers displayed in this page
Before voting
After voting
User can see the numbers and progress.
In addition, I added a "share it" function for users to share ideas with their friends and family. In the previous interview, over 45% of customers said they often tell their friends about LePur yogurt so that the "share it" button facilitates them to communicate with their circle of friends and family.
Users can easily share the idea to others to vote.
Validation & Result
First, the new product development Process shortens significantly. This crowdsourcing website published in February 2018. Sixty days later, the first new product, voted by consumers, was launched. In contrast, the old production process took 100 to 120 days from idea to product on average.
From
100-120 Days
To
60 Days
Almost
2 Times faster!
Secondly, seven LePur new products have been generated from the user voting process. Getting consumers engaged in the early product development process has become a constant for Lepur.
High Fiber
Oat
Solid Drink
Sugar-free Sugar
Sugar-free
Coconut
Yogurt
Gradian &
Yellow Peach
Greek Yogurt
N300 High
Fiber Yogurt
Pocket Smoothie
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