My Misk UX journey: Project 1 Case Study: Officely
On the second of June 2022, I got an acceptance email from Misk, informing me that I got accepted into their immersive UX design program!
UX is a field that I wanted to explore for a while but never knew where to begin, and that program provided the perfect opportunity.
When the first day rolled in, my nerves were on an all-time high. I didn’t know what to expect and what was expected of me. However, the lovely instructional team was reassuring and calmed my nerves significantly.
A few days into the program and it was time for our first project! To say I was excited is an understatement!
First, We were randomly divided into groups. And I was lucky enough to be working alongside great people.
Next, we had to pick a theme, and we settled on “Reselling Items”
and decided that our app is going to be about reselling office furniture and named it “Officely”
Our first project was divided into three stages: 1-discover and research, 2- Design 3-test, and communicate solutions.
Stage 1:discover and research
In this stage, we started with gathered research and went online to get more info about reselling office furniture and started a benchmarking process with established resale apps ex. Shobbak.
For the user research, we interviewed 8 people aged 20–45 targeting people wanting to purchase preowned office furniture
Then, we crafted our interview questions as follows :
Next, we synthesized by collecting the data points from the interviewee’s responses to perform the affinity mapping technique to finally extract our insights!
Then, we constructed our problem statement
“Our environmentalist buyers have the problem that the process of looking for preowned office furniture is complex and they cannot find a place that directly links sellers of pre-owned furniture with the buyers when they want to purchase good quality office furniture for a reasonable price. Our solution should deliver a link between the sellers and buyers to find reliable and affordable good quality office furniture “
after defining our problem statement we started building on the application concept :
We decided to build an app that will act as a preowned marketplace exclusively for office furniture. That way, users will have a fast and effective way to find pre-owned office furniture and know all the important information and details about their desired items as well as the chance to directly speak with the seller within the app.
To ensure the quality of the items listed, the app will only allow items with a grading “Fair” minimum to be sold.
Lastly for this stage, we designed the user flow :
Stage 2: in this stage, we started the design process, we made initial sketches to communicate the ideas we had for the app
After that, we developed the wireframes to get a better sense of the structure and spacing
and lastly, we created the paper prototype to test it out on the users
Stage 3: the last stage in this project is testing and communicating solutions.
we tested our paper prototype on 6 users and instructed them to do the following tasks :
- Search for an item
- open the items page
- chat with the seller
- add to cart
- checkout
after the users performed the tasks we got the following feedback
suggestions :
- would love to save their items in a wishlist
- add search by photos
- add a video of the item
- add a negotiate price button
what they liked and overall experience:
- loved that there was an installation option
- loved the chatting directly with the seller through the app
- convenient design
we iterated our design to accommodate some of the suggestions
and with that we concluded the final stage of the project and listed our next steps :
- design project on a more high fidelity level
- implement the other suggested features
- do further research for the seller's perspective
Final thoughts: I absolutely enjoyed working on the project with my fellow teammates: Thuria, Manar, and, Hecham
We had a great dynamic going on, everyone was able to share their opinions in a welcoming space.
The most challenging parts for me were 1- settling on a sketch since everyone did their own sketches it took ages to reach an agreement on the final sketch and 2- the time limit we only had a couple of days to complete the whole project.
However, the most rewarding part was presenting the project to my instructors and peers in the program and getting their valuable feedback on our project 🤩
