Producing onboarding for Austin’s first online farmer’s-marketplace- Vinder
UX Research, Strategy + Design
In this case study, I will walk you through how my team and I applied the double-diamond iterative process to investigate the pain points of Vinder’s current website.
Brief: We were tasked with designing a calendar to help sellers see and sign up for pop-up markets run by Vinder through Vinder’s website- this feature would be a new product called VinderPro.
Problem: Farmers' Market sellers need an easy-to-use onboarding process so that they can sign up for farmers' market pop-ups and increase their brand awareness.
Solution: Make a more efficient signup process for vendors to join VinderPro and sell at pop-up markets more quickly. This will also help Vinder attract more sellers.
Deliverables: Service blueprint, Feature prioritization chart, Persona, Customer Journey Maps, low-fidelity wireframes, Prototype
Timeline: 2 weeks
Team: 2 UX Researchers, 2 UX Designers
Case study b elow— -
The Process:
We used the double diamond process to help us define + solve our problem.
Discover+ Define: We conducted interviews with vendors and usability tests of the current site, we discovered that there was confusion around the signup for VinderPro and that in order to scale the business, an onboarding process on the website would be valuable.
Design+ Deliver: We designed both an onboarding process and a calendar that vendors could use to sign up for Vinder’s pop-up markets
Below, the extended case study.
Discovery:
Meeting with Sam, the founder
Upon meeting with Sam we learned that Vinder was an online marketplace for sellers under cottage law to sell homemade goods small scale.
Sam was also working on VinderPro- a project that would allow cottage law vendors/sellers to bring their goods to pop-up marketplaces in luxury apartment buildings throughout Austin.
At this point, VinderPro sign-ups would be on the phone with Sam or one of his salespeople.
He came to my team asking that we build a calendar feature for VinderPro members to help them sign up for markets through the current Vinder website.
KPI’s + Online Food Sales
We looked at a Metrilo study conducted in 2021 that broke down eCommerce KPIs for Direct to Consumer companies and a study conducted in 2020 by Colorado State University around local food systems' response to Covid to get a better understanding of retention rates and how consumers were choosing new food market channels.
Farmers' markets are 3% of the market- representing 36 million households (assuming the sample is representative of US peers) and another 17% used a mix of different types of markets.
The retention rate of new shoppers using those markets shows that farmers' markets have a retention rate of 31% over a 6-month period. For most industries, the average retention rate is 20% over an 8-week period.
These metrics support the scaling of VinderPro and what would be needed to do that.
Vinder’s Goals: VinderPro
We approached the problem with three different users in mind: sellers, building managers, and Vinder admin.
Sellers could sell their goods on Vinder’s current site or call in or email the company to sign up for a monthly subscription that would allow them to sell at multiple pop-up markets throughout Austin.
While the calendar was what shareholders proposed, we wanted to investigate further to prioritize which set of users needed to be tackled first.
We evaluated the current site from the seller's perspective and discovered a disconnect between the sellers and the VinderPro Pop-up markets.
Without signing up through word-of-mouth, how could we help scale VinderPro by empowering vendors to sign up more fluidly?
This led us to explore an onboarding process with a service blueprint!
It was after creating this blueprint that we saw areas to make more efficient processes.
The area outlined here highlights the region we sought to improve through our product design.
Currently, the scheduling process is complicated and happens across a number of different platforms. Our product’s aim was to alleviate this problem by creating a centralized location for the scheduling process.
But, before we started on design further research was needed to validate these hypotheses which is when we turned to user interviews to discover more.
User Interviews:
We conducted 8 Interviews via zoom. 6 of them were with VinderPro members.
We were interested in their current experience with Vinder and what they really liked or didn’t like about it from signing up to going to a market.
We asked them about their signup and in-person experience at non-Vinder markets.
It was important to get information on all aspects of their market experiences in order to find patterns in the usage of Vinder and areas that most needed improvement.
Based on our interviews we gathered that though Vinder.com was catered toward the online marketplace, vendors saw more value in the VinderPro product and would have liked an easier onboarding experience and a way to schedule their markets more easily.
Define: What exactly are we solving?
While a calendar was definitely a need we also wanted to consider a simplified onboarding process, and a homepage redesign.
This chart helped us sort the high effort and high-priority features of the calendar and homepage redesign and since onboarding would be low effort but high priority, we could include that to help streamline the onboarding process for VinderPro.
James sells Jams
For our target user, we will use James as an example- He’s 35 and started a side hustle from excess produce that he grew in his yard. He’s looking for a quick and easy way to sell his jams without having to put too much work into arranging markets to sell at. James wants to sell his goods right away!
The current journey shows James excited to start his side hustle of selling jams. He gets anxious about where to start, then excited upon learning about Vinder. He goes to a Vinder pop-up market and loves it.
He then gets confused by the current website which doesn’t have anything about the markets on it and is annoyed that he has to contact admin to sign up.
He finds the onboarding stressful and steps away until he gets more information. With the current layout, he can post his goods on the site but the lack of sales are disheartening. He feels insecure about future events but hopeful that the market itself will be a success.
Proposed Customer Journey
Based on our research we can conclude that Farmers' Market sellers need an easy-to-use onboarding process so that they can schedule farmers' market pop-ups in order to increase their brand awareness.
Our solution would be to make a more efficient signup process for vendors to be able to join VinderPro and sell at pop-up markets more quickly and to help Vinder attract more vendors.
With this proposed solution James’s experience is improved by Vinder.com providing information about VinderPro early on, Allowing him to signup straight from the site, simplifying the first market experience by cutting out extra steps that were blocked in the last process, getting him all the information he needs for a successful market and bringing him to the first market much faster.
Since we were prioritizing an onboarding flow and a calendar scheduling tool, we drew inspiration from a few indirect competitors who did this well.
Design: Inspiration + pain points.
For onboarding, we looked at Flipboard, Grammarly, Uber Eats, Netflix, Audible, and Duolingo.
A successful onboarding flow helps to retain users and reduce churn rate, which translates to more brand loyalty and overall more profit.
We gravitated to a benefit-oriented onboarding so that new vendors could understand how it can benefit them.
Uber eats does a great job of this with the sign-up for their drivers, while many people are familiar with uber eats, if they are not, they can read why signing up will benefit them, or they can easily skip through.
We next looked at current websites and apps that utilize a successful calendar features such as Google calendar, Calendar.com, Hubspot, and Meetup.
Meetup was the most vendor-centric, in that you can rsvp to events already set up by hosts.
We found that meetup implemented a lot of the features that vendors mentioned in interviews that they were looking for, namely essential information like time, date and place, photos, and who is going to this event.
So to summarize, we wanted to make sure all the user’s pain points discovered in our interviews were addressed in our design.
First, users mentioned that scheduling markets took too many steps across too many platforms, so we wanted to make sure that we provided a streamlined calendar scheduling feature contained within the site.
Next, users often felt uneasy and anxious before signing up for a market when they didn’t have enough information, so we wanted to include all relevant market information on this event page so that users could make an informed decision and feel prepared to go into a new market.
Lastly, users needed a way to share events with their team and employees easily as well as seamlessly integrate it into their existing calendar, so we made sure this was part of the design.
So we started off with pen-to-paper sketches to plan out how these designs could look, and then moved on to these grayscale wireframes shown here.
The left shows how we wanted the calendar page to look. It’s similar to most calendar apps that users would be familiar with, and once they select a date the pop-up markets would populate underneath.
The wireframe on the right shows the market page with the relevant details users find most important at the top, and then additional information and who else is attending.
We went about testing our initial prototype with 8 users and our system usability scale (SUS) score was calculated to be 95 out of 100 which is really quite high.
We found that of these 8 users, 75% responded positively to the calendar feature. 63% of users commented they liked the calendar integration, and 50% liked being able to see other vendors who were attending a market. 38% of users still wanted to see more visuals to help them feel more comfortable when attending a market, whether that be parking lot pictures, a table set-up, the map or more pictures of the apartment complex in general.
One user mentioned that “I feel like my dad could even use this easily and sign up for a market,” and another user said “the hardest part about this was getting on the zoom call, the prototype was much easier.”
From these tests and feedback, we were able to iterate on our existing designs.
Below is our final prototype-
