Hubble Community v1 experience
Why create a community?
To be successful and a household name in parenting, it was critical to build a relationship with our customers. As a key strategic step, Hubble Connected wanted to build a platform where parents and soon-to-be parents can connect with each other, ask for advice, find relevant content and even get help with their Hubble products.
It could act as a space where Hubble could invite experts to provide guidance and answer questions of new/soon-to-be parents. The goal was to drive engagement and customer satisfaction with Hubble products.
What is the Hubble community?
Hubble Community is a social platform aimed at fostering healthy connections between new parents, the Hubble team and subject matter experts in one safe place.
My role
I was responsible for driving the design efforts from concept to launch. Through the course of the project, I conducted competitive benchmarking, create information architecture, key feature ideation and created the final design proposal. I worked with the engineering team to launch version 1 of Hubble Community earlier this year. It was a great opportunity to collaborate with executive leadership to define the vision and work with a cross-functional team to deliver the final experience.
-
Doing an audit of the current support channels, we realized that there is tremendous potential to engage with our users and provide them with a channel to express their concerns, ask questions and get the latest information about the products and services they are subscribed to.
-
Too many sources of information on the internet tend to overwhelm new/soon-to-be parents. Users are looking for well-researched and curated content to help them through their journey of parenthood.
-
Parents want to connect with fellow parents who are in the same phase of their journey.
-
During an already hectic life schedule with a newborn, new parents struggle to find relevant information which they can trust.
-
As most users are busy and primarily accessing everything through the mobile, we wanted to make sure we designed a mobile-first experience.
Insights from research
Design process
Based on the research insights, I helped create a vision for key features of the community experience. I created a sample information architecture to help structure the different types of information. With the help of rapid prototyping, we could simulate experiences for different use cases.
This stage helped align the different stakeholders on the final community experience requirements.
MVP scoping with the engineering
Throughout the ideation phase, I worked closely with my engineering partners to get clarity on the design feasibility and implementation plan of the community experience. Based on their bandwidth, we decided to use a service called Tribe.so which could help us get started for the MVP experience. It was my responsibility to partner with them to ensure we had the solution for all the key requirements and the ability to customize the experience for Hubble.
1. Entry point for Hubble Community
As research suggested, most of our users preferred mobile as a primary device for interaction, we wanted the entire experience to be under one app. That way the user did not have to leave the Hubble ecosystem to participate in the community conversations.
-
One of the primary challenges was to figure out an intuitive entry point for users to access the community within the app. The explore tab was created as a one-stop solution for various resources Hubble wanted to offer the users in their parenting journey. This also became the entry point for accessing the community.
-
I worked with engineering to ensure, that user login details were carried forward to the community, reducing the user's effort to create a separate community profile.
Key user flows
Impact and learnings
Within 60 days of the launch, the Hubble community has grown from 0 to 3.7K active registered users with increasing user engagement. This was a great opportunity to design a version1 experience. It was a learning opportunity for me to adapt to the technical feasibility and work with an external service to bring our vision to life.
2. Communication and navigation features
Here are a few key screens like an activity feed with recent posts/conversations, a menu to navigate different groups, creating a new post etc. Throughout the community building experience, we ensured the overall experience was brand-aligned.
3. New feature promotion
To create awareness around the newly launched Hubble community, we created promotional banners and in-app notifications.
