Earning the Product Designer Badge

While some may think of “gamification” and “badges” as a passing fad, we can’t forget that one organization has successfully been using badges for over 100 years:

The Girl Scouts of America

We recently had the pleasure of hosting Girl Scout Troop 3919 to help them earn their “Product Designer” Junior Badge. As their website describes it, “When you’ve earned this badge, you’ll know how to think like a product designer: observe what makes a great product, be an innovation detective, figure out what’s working and what’s not, innovate to find solutions, mess up so you can try again.”

To help them earn their badge (see a picture of the badge, below), we described our process in creating a website and web app for GeoPalz. GeoPalz is the first fitness tracker that lets you “Walk to Win.” The more steps you take, the more points you get. You trade points in for all types of prizes, from Frisbees and jump ropes to baseball bats and footballs.

The folks at GeoPalz were kind enough the donate a bunch of product for the girls to take home and play with. To our surprise, the troop spent the following week analyzing their GeoPalz and provided us with some great feedback (see one example,below):

While not seeking to do a user validation exercise, Slice of Lime wound up learning quite a bit about the likes and dislikes of the Girl Scouts. We’ve since shared that feedback with GeoPalz to help steer the next generation of their product!

Our favorite piece of feedback was “It doesn’t come in horses.”

The troop was wonderful – very engaged and articulate. We’re happy we could be a part of them earning their “Product Designer” badges and thank the troop for their time with us.

Troop 3919 is welcome back to Slice of Lime anytime!

Qdoba User Experience Testing

We’ve been working with Qdoba Mexican Grill this year on improving the user experience of a couple key areas of their website. As with any project, we always start with a “strategy first” approach.

In Qdoba’s case, we elected to interview internal Qdoba managers as well as real customers to get a sense of what was (or wasn’t) working on the website from a user experience perspective. In exchange for free burritos, we also conducted in-store user tests at various locations, observing how each customer navigated the website to find a location and set up their Qdoba Rewards card.

The data we collected during the interview process and user testing exercises was invaluable as we worked on the next iteration of Qdoba’s website. Instead of relying on our own opinions or the opinions within Qdoba, we were able to refer to real customer opinions as a way to make decisions.

Watch the video above to see some shots from our in-store user testing sessions!