Dennis Crothers is a Product Designer based in San Francisco.
GoodGuide
research, personas, information architecture, prototyping, interaction and visual design, user testing
GoodGuide provides consumers with product information to help them make better choices and will help drive the development of safer, healthier, and more sustainable products. GoodGuide uses product ingredient information coupled with authoritative sources for chemical regulations to rate products so that consumers can have instant access to credible product information that is easily understood.
CLIENTS:
Iterative UX Design
At GoodGuide, we practiced iterative design methods to tackle some of our most challenging product features. This process included user interviews, online surveys, paper prototyping, hi-fidelity prototyping, and A/B testing.
At the product level, our biggest challenge was to create a meaningful scoring system. Starting with a single product category, shampoo, within a few cycles of iterative design and user testing , we arrived at a new health-based scoring system - and supplementing this with scores for environment and social aspects.
We asked users which shampoo they had most recently purchased. we created a high-touch review of that product, pulling all of the data we could — testing hypotheses about what they would care about most , placed it in a hierarchy, then tested those designs — along with a better rated product alternative — to see if the user would purchase that alternative.
User testing concluded that many simply wanted a product recommendation for their hair condition.
Consumers were curious about chemicals and ingredients.
Elevating a selection of top concerns raised awareness, without burying them within a complicated scoring system.
Originally, environment and society scores were bundled with the product score. Decoupling and assigning these scores to the company proved to be more relevant in user testing.
At the category level, we designed buying guides which gave users a ranked list of the healthiest products — supplemented with information about chemicals or ingredients, and our scientific testing methods, giving credibility to our rankings and to our brand.
Mobile App Design
One immediate finding that came out of user research was the need for a mobile app. To address the obvious need for customers to quickly vet ingredients contained in household cleaners, while inside a store. As GoodGuide already had the data, creating a UI for this targeted use-case was considered a great opportunity with little to zero risk.
Consumers could use the app to receive healthy product suggestions for their specific needs. Shampoo was used for testing, as customers' primary goal for shampoo is to find one to match their hair type.
Users could use photo recognition, or scan the UPC code of a product, to see the GoodGuide rating and see which chemicals may be harmful and why.
Userflow diagram of GoodGuide's Ingredient Screener app (PDF).
Developing Partnerships and New Revenue
Working with the Marketing and Business Development teams, GoodGuide created several partnerships with Amazon, Target, CVS, and other large retailers, to bring health and environmental awareness to consumers.
Amazon partnered with GoodGuide to highlight healthy and sustainable household cleaning supplies in Amazon’s Earth Day Spring Cleaning promotion. GoodGuide developed the information architecture, design, and branding of the curated guide.
Target and GoodGuide partnered to promote and integrate Made to Matter, a collection of brands that meet Target’s standards for natural, organic and sustainable products. A new revenue stream was created with the site’s redesign to support media ads — with Target as the launch sponsor.