Casestudy #2
Creating an expereince for our users to feel celebated and praised for all their hard work and dedication that they put into their growing their spiritual habit.
The Crossroads Wrapped Experience
My Role
Project Specs
The appetite for this project was a large batch of work.
Design Process
I served as the Lead Produt Designer for this project, working with a team of developers and one product manager. I also closely worked with members of the marketing and web development team at Crossroads.
I work in 8-week product cycles. The first three weeks are spent on gathering research, user mapping, and wire-framing flows. Then I transition to Figma, where I spend the next 3 weeks working on refining lo and hi-fi designs. After that, I present with my team, and the following week is spent handing off files to the development team.
Programs Used
For this project, I used Excalidraw and Aqmplify for early shaping and research gathering. Figma is for all designing, and Notion is for project management-related things and team organization.
1:1 User Interviews
For this project, I started my UX research with three user interviews with different types of Crossroads users.
The new user 👉 someone who’s downloaded the app in the past 1-15 days
The moderate user 👉 someone who uses the app but not regularly.
The super user 👉 someone who uses the app regularly to connect with God and grow spiritually.
The new user
Pro: Loves the app and the regular daily habit check in. Still needs to get into a routine of doing this daily. Onboarding is helping.
Asked about user celebrations: thinks that new users receive a lot of guidance and celebrations. I just finished onboarding, and there’s a lot of positive reinforcement to get the user started. I don't see an issue with this from his perspective.
Con: Since he completed onboarding, he sees less of a “crossroads presence” in the app and feels more on his own.
The super user
Pro: This is the most important app on this user’s phone and is used everyday religiously (pun intended 😆). He never misses a daily habit, and his streak count is somewhere in the 600s! This user, without knowing, has poured in so much data, like the time of day he journals the most or topics that he’s most interested in.
Asked about user celebrations: He thinks that celebrating his accomplishments in the app is a great idea. “I didn’t think this app could get better, but this idea really makes me excited.” He has met some of his most close friends on this app through his small group and community-finding events. There needs to be a way to celebrate us more.
Con: I do not see any cons around this feature only think that this would make users more inclined to use the app.
👉 In addition to my research and 1:1 interviews I hosted a product strategy workshop.
Attendees: Lead Product Designer (me), Product Manager, Head Pastor of Crossroads, App Team at Crossroads, Marketing Manager at Crossroads, Head of Finance at Crossroads.
Duration: 2.5 hours
Goals: learn painpoints for our stakeholders and ideas they have. Then to marry those with user pain point and to come out of it with some insights and How Might We’s
The moderate user
Pro: This app is an escape for this busy mom of 5. She may not use it every day, but it’s a great reminder to take some time when she can dedicate to God.
Asked about user celebrations: She thinks that celebrating birthdays or streak milestones could be a helpful motivator to use the app more.
Con: She is protective of some information and wouldn’t want Crossroads to overstep and start celebrating personal celebrations in her like, like her anniversary with her husband. To this user that would be an over step.
Results From Workshop
After hosting my 1:1 interviews with users. I then hosted a Product Strategy Workshop to align on stakeholders and user needs.
The outcome from this workshop resulted in 3 insights and 3 HMWs to serve as my north start while shaping this experience for users.
Insight 1
Users put so much effort into this app and growing spiritually. We would celebrate this thing in person at church, so why wouldn’t we celebrate them on our app?
Insight 2
Users also do more in this app than just growing spiturally, they have birthdays and get baptized. We should show these things in the app too.
Insight 3
Our new users feel many touch points at the beginning, but that falls off. We want to keep our users and reward them for showing up day after day.
HMW…
Celebrate user's progress in their spiritual fitness. There is so much user-created content in the app; how do we use this more?
HMW…
celebrate the things that dont fall under the term “spiritual fitness. How do we celebrate when someone celebrates a birthday or get battized?
HMW…
reward the moderate and super users and make them feel appreciated in the app?
The Problem
Our users are rockstars and give this app a lot of dedication and hard work, and they need to be recognized for it. Right now, we don’t do anything outside of sending a push notification when a prayer is answered. This app can do much better than that.
The Goal
Design an experience for crossroads users that celebrates them and gives encouraging statistics on spiritual growth and milestones.
“
I wish there were something that I could add to my profile or story on my birthday to let my followers know it's my birthday without posting something myself.”
Crossroads User
Competitors
In addition, I looked at what our competitors were doing well and how they were doing it. One of the top competitors is the YouVersion Bible App. I often seek out this app for inspiration because they are similar to what the Crossroads App does. I also looked at what Rippling and Spotify do to celebrate their users.
YouVersion - daily habits
they do a great job of keeping users in the everyday cadence. After some research, I found that they often will celebrate when a user has completed the daily tasks in the app.
Spotify - wrapped experience
They do a great job of a one-time big user celebration. The stats are exciting because they are collected all year.
Basecamp/Rippling - payday celebrations, birthdays, etc.
These are interesting because they take something that’s really not that exciting, and HR software, and make it an exciting experience for users. They cherry-pick fun milestones like payday, birthdays, and when financial goals are met.
“
I wish that the Crossroads app would recognize prayer milestones and when they’ve been answered. Or let me know when important things happen for me in the app, like my streak milestones. My streak passed 100 days the other day, and nothing happened; it felt unrewarding for such a big achievement.”
Crossroads User
Meet our user persona
Goals & Needs
Gabriella Lettow
Gabriella Lettow is a devoted mother of four, balancing a hectic schedule while prioritizing her daily habits. She seeks recognition for her efforts and desires to instill a spiritual connection with God in her children. Surrounded by like-minded mothers, she finds support in her journey of caretaking and personal growth. As a long-time Crossroads Attendant and app user, she has a lot of scripture journals, prayer requests, gratitude journals, and so much data in the app that she doesn’t even know about or has forgotten about. Her life is fast-paced pace enough with her family, and she needs to be alerted when important things come up; her best friend is the calendar app on her phone.
Keeping an importance on daily habits and connecting with God.
Feeling like the app is a place that her children can eventually use as a tool to grow spiritually.
To feel celebrated more for her accomplishments in the app
An easy way to show her progress in the app.
Habits & pain points
#themom
Demographics
Age: 37 years old
Occupation: Stay-at-home mom
Status: Married
Location: Colombus, Ohio
#Family
#Friends
Personality
Extroverted
Busy
Creative
Organized
Team Player
#Community
Gabbi commits herself to her daily habits even tho she lives an incredibly busy life as a mother of 4. Not receiving praise for this makes her feel defeated or underappreciated.
She wants a way that she feels comfortable sharing with her children one day to help them connect with God.
Long time Crossroads users with mass amounts of scripture journals, prayer requests, gratitude journals, etc, in the app over the years.
User Journey Map
Our user persona, Gabriella, has two main key frustrations that I tried to solve for in this expereince.
In-app celebrations and Appreciation: She feels underappreciated in the app for how much dedication she puts in daily.
Progress tracking: It’s hard for her to view her progress in the app with her spiritual fitness.
Information Architecture
Excalidraw is a program where I start thinking more lo-fi and begin sketching. From there, I transition to Figma, using it as my go-to platform for creating high-fidelity designs and prototypes. It's a fluid workflow that allows me to capture ideas effectively while transitioning smoothly between tools.
Lo & High Fidelity in Figma
After sketching, I realized that some screens would be dynamic and would need different states depending on the user’s data. For example, the first card in the experience reflects the user’s most active time of day, morning, mid-day, or evening. For this, I needed to design three different states for all of those different times. There are 6 other dynamic cards in this experience, so I also designed and flushed out those cards visually.
Choosing the data: 2 separate experiences
I wanted to create a once-a-year experience that celebrates all the hard work that the users put in daily. One problem I could see is that some users in the app don’t use the app daily, and I didn’t want their statistics to discourage them from using the app further. My solution to this was to create two different flows for users.
The first flow would accommodate the super/moderate user who uses this app regularly and has a lot of data to work with. They have enough data that they can serve as stand-alone flows.
The second flow would be for the average/beginner users who haven’t spent a ton of time in the app, and the amount of data will reflect that. in the end, the flow would be discouraging. Instead, these users will see statistics from the whole Crossroads community, these numbers are in the hundreds of thousands.
Lo-Fi Sketching
I started to map out the two different flows and when they would show on each end for all users. A large part of this pitch would be collecting data for a year before users see the final product, so ensuring I got the flow and the right data collected was essential to this project. Below are the fields that I decided to collect data on.
Overall app progress
Scripture stats
Prayer Stats
Gratitude Stats
Connections made
Closet friends in the app
Journey Card
Service team
Summary to share out on your story
The Solution
Similar to the spotify wrapped experience, Crossroads now celebrates users achievements over the entire year with one enjoyable experience released ever December.
Findings from the first release.
After a year of gathering data on our users, we released the crossroads-wrapped experience to the public in December 2021 for the first time.
One thing about this project is that it happens every year, meaning that all year, this sits in the back of my mind, and if I ever have an idea of what I want to add to this experience, I can. It’s a project that keeps evolving and growing and is now one of the most loved features for users and also our staff and stakeholders at Crossroads.
Sharing stats
We can see when our users share out their crossroads-wrapped summary card on their story in the app. Over the years, this wrapped experience has proven to be one of the most loved features of the app for users. Every year we see more and more people watching and sharing their wrapped expeirence.
35.3%
2021 - users posted summary card
57%
2021 - watched wrapped experience
76%
2022 - users posted summary card
80%
2022 - watched wrapped experience
94%
2023 - users posted summary card
99%
2023- watched wrapped experience
Want to see more?
These mock-ups can only do so much.
Download the Crossroads Anywhere App for the full experience and up-to-date designs.