ENHANCING UGC WITH A CUSTOM-BUILT
WEB APP
SUMMARY
I led a project to build a Root app demo, giving our influencers and content creators a deeper and more genuine experience when talking about Root’s benefits, ultimately leading to higher performing paid media.
ROLE: Concept, Project Management, Art Direction, Strategy
WEB APP DEVELOPER: Necati Barutcu
THE CHALLENGES
HARD TO CONVEY THE ROOT APP EXPERIENCE
For Root’s creative team, there was no easy way to capture a live-action, hands-on visual experience of the Root insurance app for marketing purposes, outside of a real Root customer being logged into their own account. This was especially frustrating when trying to produce User Generated Content (UGC) with hired creators and influencers. Instead of creators being able to interact directly with the app and explain its features and benefits, they really could only go off of provided scripts.
LACK OF USER PERSONALIZATION
The engineering team had provided us with a few test app builds for marketing content, but these had a very limited feature set and could only be downloaded through a complicated network of passwords. Across the versions, the user’s info was also locked, resulting in creative assets that always displayed the same price plan, car model, and driving score. It was impossible for the team to change these attributes and reflect what the brand was really all about: giving each driver their own unique driving score and price.
THE IDEA: A DEMO APP
To solve this problem, I launched a project to allow a user (ex. a content creator) to freely explore the best features of the Root app as if they were a real Root customer. I called this the Root demo app.
I reached out to a local Developer and we began discussing the scope of the project. We worked out which features we could build in a Progressive Web Application, eliminating the need for the user to have to download anything to their personal device.
Choosing a plan
Exploring the driver
scorecard
Leaving your old insurance
is easy
Customizing your plan
MAKING THE DEMO UNIQUE TO EACH USER
I wanted the demo to feel as real as possible, so I designed a system that allowed the user to have a personalized experience. The user could enter in their (fictional) driver info and the demo would populate the corresponding fields.
For some of the other variables such as plan prices and driver scores, we built in curated ranges of random values. This effectively would give each user a unique profile, and avoid any content repetition.
FULL DEMO WIREFRAME
Here’s the full wireframe I built for the project with the selected features we targeted.
RESULTS: GENUINE REACTIONS.
MORE ENGAGEMENT.
After our content creators had used the demo app and sent their video footage back to me to edit, the team immediately saw a major shift in how they had responded to the demo tool. Now with a tangible, functional app experience they could easily interact with on their own phones, their reactions and levels of excitement were vastly more natural and genuine than before. They were also able to talk about the features with more confidence, seeing them now first hand versus before as only talking points in a script.
More importantly, this translated into more impressions and conversions for Root, particularly on Facebook. From then on, User Generated Content became a solid component in Root’s performance media campaigns, consisting of some of the best ads we ever ran.
