hiku
Strategic research and interaction design to improve customer retention.
The hiku device and app were designed to help busy families stay on top of their grocery shopping.
Do you ever have to go grocery shopping? Yeah, I thought so. Did you ever get home from the store and realize you forgot something? Yep. That's what inspired hiku. hiku helps busy families stay on top of their grocery shopping.
Scan it. Say it. Shop it. hiku lives in your kitchen, scans barcodes and recognizes your voice – creating a shared shopping list on your phone so you always know what you need. It has one button simplicity so everyone in the family can use it to help keep the list up-to-date.
In the end, hiku had a small (too small!) group of very enthusiastic users. This project was a genuine passion for me. I love cooking for my family, and it felt rewarding to assist numerous families in staying on top of their grocery shopping. Customers absolutely adored this product - conducting user research visits in people's kitchens was always enjoyable. However, we could not establish an efficient distribution channel on our own. We made significant efforts to keep hiku alive within one of our partner's businesses, but eventually, the company and product were shut down.
The easiest way to understand hiku is to watch the video I art directed.
Understanding drivers of churn and using design to fix it
At launch, 39% of hiku users were still using the product after 6 months. Not bad for a brand new category of product! But we needed to improve the retention rate so we could maximize the value of our existing customers when we started selling consumption data to retailers. My first step was to work with the engineering team to implement Mixpanel so we could improve our visibility into usage and understand in greater detail where people were dropping out.
The analytics pointed us to several key points in the customer journey that needed further investigation.
Onboarding and education
Many customers never connected their device to their home wifi. Many were only using the device to scan or speak but not both scanning and speaking.
Habit formation and maintenance
Many seemed to create a habit out of hiku but at some point stopped using the product. I recruited customers for observational research studies, conducted the research and analyzed the data to identify opportunities to encourage a hiku habit.
Fixing onboarding
I watched many customers struggle to follow the in-app instructions for how to connect hiku to wifi. In fact, some customers did not understand they needed to download the hiku app before the device would work. There were many other challenges - from customers not knowing their wifi passwords to ambiguous calls to action in the on-screen instructions. I itemized these challenges and brainstormed solutions with the CEO and engineering team. We updated the Quick Start guide that came in the box with hiku to include a more prominent “download from the app store” call to action and completely reimagined the in-app onboarding instructions. One important improvement were video demonstrations of how to scan and speak with hiku which we embedded into the onboarding experience.
This educational video captures many of the onboarding enhancements I made for hiku.
Encouraging habit formation and maintenance
There were many reasons why some customers who were able to get started with hiku eventually stopped using it over time. One issue I discovered through research was quite simple - the device ran out of battery and the customer never recharged it. For this, we implemented a device battery level indicator and notifications in the app. I also uncovered a long list of functionality customers wanted to see in the app. I actively managed this backlog of features, prioritizing the features with the highest potential return in terms of retention and worked closely with engineering to make these incremental improvements.
Two example features are the add items flow and the quantity picker.
Add items flow – Many iterations of the add items flow led to a quick an easy way to get items into the list using the app rather than the device (click to enlarge).
Quantity picker – The quantity picker is optimized for incrementing by one, and secondarily the user can select fractions and units. This model also supports any quantity information added with voice entry through the device (click to enlarge).
Hiku was a popular holiday gift. We considered the retention of our holiday cohort a key metric. Over the two years of incremental improvements, we saw steady gains in our 6-month retention rate from 39% to 62%.
Impact on retention
