Background

In the past few years I’ve been gravitating toward “cleaner” products. Part of it has been personal, but it’s also related to a growing cultural awareness about the greater impacts of the products we use everyday and how those choices affect our own health, the environment, and the people involved in producing those products. 

Switching over the products hasn’t been easy. A lot of products have “natural” marketing but not natural ingredients, not to mention that they can be more expensive and some of them frankly just don’t work. 

When a former colleague told me he’d also been experiencing difficulties switching to clean products for his family and was thinking of ways to improve the experience for others, I jumped at the chance to work on a problem that was so close to my own experience.

Goal

Make it easier for people to switch to natural and sustainable products.

Formative research

We started with background research, using secondary sources to learn more about attitudes and trends related to clean shopping. These takeaways, among others, pointed to the need for an easier clean shopping experience:

• Most people do want to buy more natural products, but concerns about higher prices, product effectiveness, and misleading marketing get in the way
• Millennials especially are interested in shopping more ethically and there is a willingness to pay more for products that align with their values
• Chemical sensitivities are on the rise, and many people are actually getting sick from chemicals and fragrance in their products

We also began to develop a clearer picture of our target audience.

User interviews

We conducted user interviews with members of our target audience to learn more about their pain points with shopping for natural products. Here’s what we found: 

• The primary motivation for using natural products was family safety, but environmental concerns were also top of mind and couldn’t necessarily be separated from the safety issue. Participants saw clean shopping as a win-win — better for my family and better for the environment. 
• There’s a lot of research involved in shopping for clean products. Participants would start with a general google search, then end up spending hours of time reading Amazon reviews, cross-referencing ingredient scores with the Environmental Working Group (EWG), and checking different sites to see product availability and price. 
• Participants were overwhelmed by the number of choices and the amount of research they needed to do on each product. Many didn’t have time and would just get something “natural” off the shelf quickly, which sometimes resulted in the product not working. This trial and error was expensive and sometimes drove participants back to conventional standbys.

Product definition

Based on our formative research, we put some more definition around the product we wanted to offer so we could move toward design and testing an MVP. Here’s what we aimed for:

• Trustworthy product ratings. Rate what’s most important to our audience — purity, performance, and price. Among other data points, like Environmental Working Group ratings, the ratings would be based on a large volume of user reviews. 
• Simplicity of choice. Rather than listing hundreds of products and overwhelming the decision making process, we aimed for 10-12 products per category.
• Information all in one place. Provide all the information customers need to decide on a product in one place. Summarize information so it’s easy to parse, but allow those who want more info to dig deeper. 

Although we envisioned a wide variety of categories in the future, we started with basic categories in home cleaning and personal care.

Initial designs

My initial rounds of sketching and wireframes focused on basic site structure and how best to display our ratings and product attributes. We also knew mobile shopping experience was important, so I created mobile layouts first.

Visual design

For branding and visuals, I wanted to move away from traditional “natural” branding (think kelly green and orange), but not so far that it doesn’t resonate with eco-friendly shoppers. I also wanted a clean aesthetic that would match our focus on clean products and our brand values of transparency, simplicity, and ease. It was important to me that clean shopping feel attainable, so the design is meant to be more accessible than luxurious.

Prototyping & testing

I prototyped the shopping flow in Invision and ran user studies throughout the design process to evaluate the prototypes and early implementation with members of the target audience. 

The feedback was very good — even though the site was in very early stages, most participants had a positive response and said it would save them time spent on research on money spent on products that don't work. 

The studies also helped us get feedback and prioritize items to work on: 

• Based on participants feedback, we added sorting to the product category pages so users can sort based on purity, performance, or price as well as the average score. 
• Our early implementation used user reviews for purity ratings even though we eventually  planned to incorporate EWG ratings. Some participants told us they didn’t trust user reviews for purity and we raised the priority of updating the purity ratings. 
• We separated cleaning and personal care items into distinct categories based on user behavior and feedback.
• Along with other factors, participants’ desire to see more information about the rating system up front evolved our landing page.

Key features

MVP launch

As we approached our MVP launch, we realized we’d spent way too much time focusing on product and not enough time on customer acquisition. It was an important realization for two product-focused people, and we quickly switched gears, using the book Traction as a guide for our customer acquisition experiments. We launched our MVP of Clean Goods in May 2019 and promoted it through social media, micro influencers, our own blog, and paid search.

Clean Goods today

After our MVP launch, we continued to experiment with what worked best for users, like purchasing through our site with our “best price guarantee” vs. purchasing through Amazon referral links. We also tested new ways to help people make the switch to natural products, from a product finder quiz to offering product samples in the form of tester kits. Ultimately, however, we stopped working on Clean Goods due to a lack of traction with our user base.

While not ultimately successful, Clean Goods taught me valuable lessons about user acquisition, customer validation, growth, and product-market fit, which I took to my next role at Papaya.

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