a UX Case Study
My Role:
UX Designer & Researcher
My Team:
5 UX Designers | 2.5 Weeks
Figma | Google Suite | Miro
Garage and Estate sales are great opportunities for hosts to sell items they no longer use and for shoppers to find unique, useful, or normally expensive items at a bargain.
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My role as a UX Designer and Researcher was to create a mobile app that allows shoppers to locate Garage and Estate sales in their area, which may not be otherwise advertised.
The Process
The Problem
Thrift and bargain shoppers looking to strike great deals often aren’t aware of garage and estate sales happening in their area.
The Solution
A new mobile application that allows users to find or list and advertise current and upcoming garage and estate sales.
The User
Adult thrift and bargain shoppers looking to find good-quality vintage or second-hand items at a deep discount.
Empathize & Research
To kick us off, we created a proto-persona based on our assumptions of what demographic would be most likely to initially adopt an app that allows them to search and find garage and estate sales.
Once we collaborated to discuss the above persona, we interviewed six potential users and distributed a survey via our personal and professional networks. Our primary goal was to understand more about shoppers interested in locating garage and estate sales, and how a mobile app would help them acheive their goals.
Survey Results
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91% of survey respondents are motivated by affordability and quality
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55% of survey respondents are frustrated by product availability
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64% of survey respondents want to spend less than 10 minutes searching for sales
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Currently, 73% of survey respondents find garage sales primarily by road signs
This data helps us understand that, while our users are interested in finding a great deal, they also aren't willing to be particularly inconvenienced in their search for vintage or bargain items.
Affinity Diagram
After our interviews, we organized our results into an affinity diagram in Miro, to make sense of what we learned.
Competitor Analysis
As we interviewed our potential users, we studied our competitors, to see what we were up against.
Define
Based on our research findings, we drew up an Empathy Map, further enabling us to understand our user's motivations.
User Journey & User Flow
Once we knew a little bit about our user, we began defining our User Journey and our User Flow. This helped us manifest the framework of how our app would be organized, prior to usability testing.
Storyboard
We now knew 1) a little bit about our user and 2) a little more about the need we would be fulfilling, so we gave Julia a short story to summarize her wants and motivations.
Ideate
Our user interviews and survey gave us insights into what information shoppers would want from our app, so we created a feature prioritization matrix to help us decide what features to include first to get a viable product up and running. This would put us in a good position to expand our app in the future.
Sketches
Since there were five designers on the team, we each created a few sketches to decide the creative direction we wanted to take for our app.
Prototyping
Now that we had collaborated and talked about overall app design, we came up with our first mid-fidelity prototype. I worked on creating the search results, list a sale, and login/signup pages while the rest of my team worked on their respective assignments.
Though I was satisfied with our first protoype overall, I was concerned that the navigation feature for the app centered around an expanding plus button on the bottom right (which implies a single action function), rather than a navigation bar on the bottom. Though the group decided to move forward with the design as it was, we made sure to pay attention to this choice during testing.
Testing
Excited to move into the testing phase and get our hard work in front of potential users, for our first round of interviews the team aligned on what questions we wanted our usability testing to answer:
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What barriers does the user experience when attempting to complete the assigned tasks and why?
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What aspects of the application does the user find frustrating or pointless and why?
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Does the user consider these functionalities to be helpful when trying to find or list a garage or estate sale and why or why not?
Usability Testing Insights
We conducted six tests and learned the following:
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Users were confused by the navigation button and thought its function was to create a new sale listing.
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Due to this confusion, users either took a long time or failed to log in withought moderator guidance.
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Users want more filtering options and search customization features.
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Users were confused as to how to access their profile information due to "My Page" verbiage
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Users were able to easily understand how to bookmark a listing to save it for later.
Design Changes
After consolidating our feedback and prioritizing highest vs lowest priority changes to implement, we went back to our designs to address some of the pain points. Due to time constraints, we focused primarily on navigation and usability, vs expanding upon current features. We:
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Changed the primary navigation to a more traditional style
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Added a brief walkthrough of page navigation upon first launch
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Changed "My Page" verbiage to "My Profile"
Conclusion & Next Steps
We've made excellent progress in our 2.5 weeks, but the work isn't finished! If given the opportunity, below is our roadmap of next steps, in addition to further testing.
Do Next:
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Create filter capabilities
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Create an advertising feature to help generate revenue
Do Later:
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Update search results preview to show more information
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Edit and caption images