ACC SportSmart

BACKGROUND

In New Zealand the ACC is essentially the nation's semi-government owned insurance agency (NZ has socialized, unversal healthcare). One of their many initiatives was to educate Kiwis about how to safely participate in sports activities. The ACC SportSmart campaign was rolled out in stages.

New Zealanders are also very active with sports and sports injuries are common. Our first project was to build a micro-site that featured safe warm-up techniques to prevent muscle injury. We also had to plan for other sections of the larger SportSmart program. The second stage was to incorporate content around concussions (prevention and response). A third stage included a library of downloadable resources and a special event page.

Company
DNA

Teammates
Zak Kinnaird (Visual Design)
Jemma Buckland (Project Mgmt)
James Ayers (Development)

Timeline
7 weeks

PROCESS

When DNA was originally awarded this project we were presented with a 400-page tome that was the SportSmart program. We were tasked with building a solution that would eventually contain most of the 400 pages of content. I took the document home with me and literally read it cover to cover. DNA needed to fully understand the content and its architecture in order to be successful. I mapped out all this infomation architecture using Omnigraffle.

I paired up with Zac Kinnaird, one of DNA's talented visual designers, and we talked our way through the various problems presented.

We skipped the wireframes. Yup that's right. I did a number of napkin sketches which was enough for Zak to make something beautiful with. I created a prototype of these screens using InVisionApp. We tested our prototype with over 20 research participants using a hybrid kind of user research where it was part interview and part usability test

There were only a few tweaks to make based off the user feedback and instead of reworking the prototype, I took Zak and my work over to the client where I paired with their development team for a couple weeks. 

RESULTS

Paired with a large marketing plan that included TV, radio, online, outdoor and print ads, it was important to understand how users found the app. Different landing pages, clones of eachother served as a tool to seperate these channels in the analytics.

We looked carefully at time-on-page and average session length as well as anayltics from YouTube to tell us what content was being consumed and what was getitng skipped. We coupled this with a heat maps.

At first the metrics looks pretty bad. We had a huge drop-off rate after users' second interaction (show on the right). We determined that the fonts and the animated hero image were too bandwidth-heavy for rural mobile users. After fixing the issues we saw a dramatic change.

The first month saw over 12,000 unique visitors spending, on average, 22 minutes on the site, blowing the projections out of the water. It was actually being shared in a semi-viral way amongst teens and young adults. 

LEARNINGS

So much process can be cut out when you pair with other stakeholders. This was imperative because our budget was so small for a project this size. We worked closely with the client to develope this solution and there would've been so much lost context if we had simply emailed Sketch files to the clients dev team. Similarly, working closely with Zak meant that I could eliminate the need for proper wireframes and hours of work in Sketch or Figma.

Also, sometimes as a UX designer you need to bite your tongue. A 3rd-party was responsible for the filming of the videos and photos used my the web app. Usability testing showed us that the videos were too dark to be followed by end-users when they were outside in bright light. It would've cost a fortune to re-shoot everything since they'd hired a Rugby celebrity as the key character.