Problem

Situation: Modern churches are faced with many issues involving growth and attracting new memberships. These problems include innovation, digital identity, communication issues, resistance to change, and retaining new congregants. We believed by creating a new innovative technology based system for The Ave we could solve these common issues.

Conceptualization and Ideation

The first part of our research was to understand how people attend church.

Task: For this, we conducted interviews with church members. This allowed us to understand their biggest frustrations and to identify the pain points they encounter on a daily basis. We conducted design thinking workshops and from the research I started creating prototypes and design concepts for the use cases. After having a go-ahead from the team on the mockups, I began to conduct usability tests with the low-fidelity designs. Once I had confidence in the deliverables, I began finalizing designs.

Iterations until completion

To get started we had a design thinking workshop with the client where we pinpointed certain issues they faced and created our problem statement followed by our big idea. Besides the design thinking workshops we ran small iterations based off the clients input followed by a large refactoring iteration in Q2. We also created a repository in Bitbucket/Sourcetree and Zoho sprints, this allowed us to have version control throughout the development phase. Finally, a retrospective case study was formed in mural in preparation for post-mortem documentation, both internally and externally.

Agile and Design Thinking Framework

Iterations were based off weekly sprints, where we had daily stand ups with the team and scrum master. We tracked our daily metrics and details on backlog items and their respective acceptance criteria during, the cupcake, cake to wedding cake, until we got to the minimum viable product. For the duration of the project we monitored our progress and version control through a pull method using GIT, Jira, Zoho Sprints, KanBan Flow and Bit Bucket. Below is the process we used that helped us get to the MVP:

Solution

After various design thinking sessions with the client we finally came up with a deliverable that would help the client engage better with their end users.

Action: Ultimately, we rebranded their entire church to better reflect their community. We created a new logo which was balanced with a softer typography. Also, we expanded their color palette based on the most frequently used colors in the church market. In addition to creating a new name and logo, we also created business cards, banners, envelopes and flyers for the church. Besides the printed material, we completely created a digital identity for the church. This included a custom web and mobile application which allowed the end user to have full control of the website through a dashboard. To maintain consistency and ensure efficient design to development handover, I developed a modular design system based on reusable components and their states, such as video, events, and calendar. Branding design including video, stationary, logos and pamphlets were created using illustrator, InDesign, Photoshop, Premier and After Effects. UI/UX designs for the project were completed in Sketch and Invison. The entire project was developed in ReactJS and Native followed by back-end development in ASP.Net. The MySQL database including JSON data and API’s were stored in Microsoft Azure. Version control, including managing the GIT, project sprints and API testing were completed in Bitbucket/SourceTree, Postman and Zoho Sprints. Below are the solutions we came up with:

Seeing Results

It was a pleasure working with the team on this engagement.

Results: The final brand identity for the church is likely now to remain intact as the church grows, but even better, the work improved an important digital tool used by all the new members that will attend the church. Below is a few of the overall metrics we achieved from this engagement: