Beagle

heuristic analysis

Project Summary

Beagle is a browser extension that helps users find environmental and vegan-friendly alternatives to their product searches. The problem they’re trying to address is the challenge that currently comes with finding such sustainable alternative products online. I stumbled upon this product on the internet and it was a genre of product that I didn’t use before. I used this opportunity to study the product and note down my insights.

What I learned through the process

The prioritization of features important to the vision and user experience v/s features that do not add value to the feasibility of the product
How to communicate design findings and information to clients

As a master’s student, learning and collaborating through an EdTech platform such as Blackboard Learn was a daily occurrence. Using a tool every day for the same tasks, one naturally comes across the problems and nuances involved. After realizing that I was sharing these frustrations with other people, I decided to embark on a journey to improve the experience of this tool. I worked on this project as a team with one other person in the span of 10 weeks

What they've done right

Prioritizing their product on the home page

Although the vision matters for products that encourage a societal idealogy, I believe the product itself shouldn’t be thrust behind the message. Beagle embodies this well by keeping their home page simple with minimal information and a short video explaining the product and how it works. They explain their vision in the ‘About Us’ message, where a user willing to know more can find it easily.

Giving the user an opportunity to contributeto the product

Giving the user some control to contribute not only helps increase the quality of the product but also gives them a sense of accomplishment to do more. This can be further improved by gamifying the contribution process.

WHAT COULD BE IMPROVED

Misleading information

Beagle has a referral feature where they promise to plant 5 trees for every successful referral. I used my alternate emails to validate this, and it seems they currently haven’t started implementing this feature. The email I got on the referred side didn't provide any information about the ‘we plant 5 trees’ feature as well. I also didn't receive any acknowledgment message on the referee’s side once the referral code was used. Although a non-working feature may be looked over in the beta stage for other products, it is hard to ignore a failure to ‘plant 5 trees’ for a product like Beagle which encourages environmental ethics. This could be a risk to lose early targeted customers who would be excited about such a feature. It is better to introduce this only as a working feature.

‘Trending’ feature could be improved

For a product encouraging consumers to make more conscious purchase decisions, advertising and encouraging ‘trending’ products seems to be in poor taste. This goes against their vision and might lose some of their targeted customers. A better alternative would be to add a button that redirects interested users to a web catalog that contains all the sustainable alternatives in one place. This way, users who want to just browse products can do so at one place which is more convenient compared to the small area that is currently being used.

‘Early-access’ onboarding seems unnecessary

Early access onboarding is useful in cases where the product needs to be tested, design assumptions to be validated, and create some excitement about the product. This is useful for products such as video games, or large-scale software products. For a straightforward product like Beagle, it only makes the onboarding difficult and risks losing customers. Making the user onboarding seamless would be an advantage for Beagle as it relies on those early customers for feedback and contribution to the initial product catalog.