Case study
This was a project for the NUS module CS3240 Interaction Design.
We wanted to create a platform for small scale home-based businesses to market their products and manage their orders on one streamlined platform.
Mar 2021 - May 2021
(3 months)
We were a team of 5 from a range of disciplines: Computer Science, Engineering, and Communications and New Media.
As this was a first UX project for many of us, we all took active and equal roles across research, prototyping and testing.
Small-scale home-based businesses owners in Singapore often do not have an effective platform to market and sell their products. Firstly, this makes it difficult for potential customers to find them. In addition, the lack of a streamlined platform makes for a more disjointed and disorganized workflow for many sellers.
We wanted to create a platform for small scale home-based businesses to market their products and manage their orders on one streamlined platform.
Our target users are home-based business owners and the shoppers who are looking to purchase from these businesses. It's clear that both these user groups are deeply involved in the problem space with interconnected needs.
We conducted contextual inquiries with 5 users: 3 sellers and 2 buyers. We recorded our interviews and transcribed them before meeting up. With our new set of raw data, we sat down together to share our findings, jotting them down on post-is and categorising them into Key Observations, User Statements, Breakdowns, Insights and Design Ideas.
Using affinity mapping to organize our findings, we first grouped them based on similar themes. Labelling each group, we proceeded to group them again. After a few iterations, we were able to identify common high-level themes in the data.
Many shoppers do indeed appreciate and seek out home-based businesses. Products are often customized or made-to-order, and are more unique as compared to large corporate businesses. Yet, there currently exists no platform for home-based businesses that manages to address these pain points
Marketing is a common key concern of home-based business owners. Although many feel that the platforms they use should be able to market their products well and help them grow their customer base, existing platforms have fallen short.
We found that the visuals of a product is equally important to both sellers and buyers. Many home-based business owners make use of aesthetic cover photos to capture attention and differentiate their products from competitors.
Many sellers struggle with not having an all-in-one platform to consolidate their workflow, while many buyers find existing order processes of different home-based businesses uncoordinated.
Both parties want a good line of communication with each other, which adds a personal touch and increases trust. In addition, many sellers expressed the need for organizing their chats with customers well to make sense of their orders.
We made use of personas, creating one for each of our target user groups, to guide our ideation process and keep our solution focused on the real needs of users, along with user journey mapping.
We started off by individually designing low-fidelity wireframes of key user tasks, which we reviewed internally. This was a quick-and-dirty process, allowing us to quickly draft layouts for various sections of the app.
After an internal review, we evolved our wireframes into higher fidelity prototypes, which we then used to conduct a second round of review, this time using a heuristic evaluation checklist. This allowed us to further refine our individual prototypes before combining the best features together.
We had discovered other user sentiments like how shoppers prioritize value and look for credibility. However, these are common user goals in many e-commerce and buy-sell platforms.
What stood out as important to us were insights that were unique to the problems specifically faced by home-based business owners and their customers:
Sellers want to reach out to customers, especially in saturated markets with many established sellers. Buyers want a way to look for sellers of particular products they are interested in.
Multiple platforms make it difficult to manage orders. Even on a singular platform, there are messages from inquiring, interested and confirmed buyers. Sellers want to keep track of the numerous chats and processes.
Since home-based businesses tend to sell more unique and customized products, giving sellers the ability to curate their brand image and collaborate with each other on the platform itself is important.
We conducted individual heuristic evaluations on our 3 key tasks and combined them to form a group heuristic evaluation using Nielson's 10 Heuristics:
âExploreâ page and Search function is easy to navigate, with no extra steps that increase cognitive load (H2, H4, H6)
Searching for specific products and finding out product details is easy and intuitive (H2, H8)
Good onboarding tutorial for new users (H10)
Searching for specific products and finding out product details is easy and intuitive (H2, H8)
Clear feedback when users complete an action, eg. posting a listing or marking as shipped (H1)
Chat management feature can be confusing (H3, H4)
Inaccessible: Chats can only be accessed from Home or Explore page (H2, H6)
âEdit Profileâ and âEdit Profile Cardâ misleading and ambiguous (H4)
Reorder Listings feature should be more prominent and not hidden in "Edit Profile" section (H2, H6)
No clear distinction between "Pick ups" and "Meetups" when creating a listing (H2, H4)
We also conducted a small task-based usability testing session remotely via Zoom. Of the 5 participants we recruited, 3 were sellers while 2 were buyers.
5 participants from our primary and secondary target groups aged 21 to 24 were recruited. 3 were home-based sellers while 2 were buyers
Participants shared their screen and were encouraged to think aloud. We assigned them a post test questionnaire and interviewed them for additional feedback.
Achievability of Key Tasks
Intuitiveness & Ease of Use
At least 2 of us were present in each session. Each took on the role of either a facilitator or observer.
Our new feature allows sellers to reorder the listings on their profile. However, users had difficulty discovering the feature as it was hidden away in the "Edit Profile" settings. Our chats feature is a central part of our app, yet it was only accessible from the "Home" and "Explore" screens.
Despite our chat management features, it was still a challenge to find a specific chat. This was due to a lack of search and filter functionalities in the chat interface. It was also not immediately obvious which listing a chat was regarding.
Our chat management features allowed sellers to categorise specific chats as "Paid", "Shipped" and "Completed". This flow turned out to be too rigid as there were other use cases, hence confusing both buyers and sellers when trying out the chat features.
In the "Profile" screen we have an "Edit Profile" button and an "Edit Profile Card" button. The difference between the two was not immediately obvious to users. Similarly, users were confused between "Pick ups" and "Meet ups".
Users' chats are made more accessible from the bottom navigation bar since chat management is a key feature in the application. Users can easily access their chats to carry out their purchases/transactions.
Toggling between buying and selling chats was previously unintuitive as it required bringing a hidden context menu. We've now redesigned it to be immediately obvious using the menu bar. This increases noticeability and navigability, allowing users to intuitively understand how their chats are organised by default.
Users can now label their chats with their own custom labels, any time during the transaction process. This is an improvement from being restricted and automatically shifted to the fixed 'categories' previously implemented in the chats. Filters also allow users to find listing-specific chats, or chats corresponding to their labels. Of course, searching for chats is available as well.
The reorder listing feature has been moved to the top of the Profile page. Users can now easily curate their profile without having to fumble for the feature.
This was one of my first projects in UX. In hindsight, there were many things I could have done better, and these are some of my takeaways:
We had to prioritise problems with higher severity and a select few minor severity issues that are quick to fix. There were several further changes we might have undertaken to improve our prototype, but they not adopted as we considered those usability issues less severe, and they did not fall within the scope of the main user tasks we were designing for.
...especially when designing within time constraint, and when we are still early on in our learning journey in UX. Working off conventional and well established UI patterns also means that users will find the interface easier and more intuitive to use.
It's easy to ideate for fancy features but just as easy to go off track. The challenge was how to go back to the research as a group, admit we made a mistake and fix it with the limited time we had.
In my next project, I would hence aim to be more intentional and focused on user needs especially during the ideation phase. This would be my main takeaway: that throughout the process, you need to genuinely keep in mind who you are designing for.
