Raise Mobile
Raise.com is a gift card marketplace where people can buy and sell gift cards. After building a successful product on the web, they wanted to create a mobile offering. The goal was to acquire new users and provide existing users mobile access to the service they loved.
“While [CEO George] Bousis declined to say how many total users Raise has today or how much revenue the company generates, he did attribute much of Raise’s growth, traction and the subsequent interest from NEA to its mobile adoption.”
As lead researcher, my role was to understand how people were buying gift cards currently, how they were using mobile tools and apps while shopping, what the contexts of use were, and how would the Raise experience need to change from desktop to mobile.
We worked with Raise's analytics team to define user groups we wanted to learn more about. I created screening criteria that was used to recruit current and non-users. Research was done remotely using screen sharing tools to observe how users shop online and where gift cards play a use in their process.
One example of a feature that made it into production because of the research was we found that people like the positive feedback of being able to see their savings. The app prominently features the user's saving to reinforce the value that Raise was providing them.
The success of the mobile application helped gain new investors in early 2015 as they raised $56 million. Read more about their growth over at TechCrunch.