A Semi-Formal Product Audit
Prologue
9 am on a Monday morning, as I made my way to my office, I received a message from a colleague — the link to My Dream Store. ‘For starting your business,’ read the next message.
I had once casually mentioned about my wish to sell art online.
T-shirts weren’t exactly what I had in mind, but it definitely sparked an idea. And soon the idea became a dream. I dreamt of a successful product that would establish my mother’s art and monetise her passion. An on-line fashion brand that fuses traditional art with casual fashion.
Within the next few hours, I had created an account, borrowing the URL of my mother’s blog.
A month later, the baby was in my hands — a soft navy blue t-shirt with my mother’s white kolam.
What followed in the intervening time, forms the basis of this story.
The ‘whys’ of documenting my experience
I chose to write this partly for academic reasons, with several lessons to be learnt for MDS as well as anyone else who might be interested.
The main reason for writing this, though, is that I like the folks behind MDS. I have interacted with a few of the members of the team, and have received great support. Their passion for the product shines through, and there are only greater heights they can go to.
Disclaimer: The observations presented in this story are based on my personal experience only. A proper audit of user experience must involve more participants for a better evaluation. In keeping with the informal style of the story, relevant principles have been mentioned only in the accompanying notes. Please use observations with caution.
Meet MDS
My Dream Store is a Hyderabad-based apparel printing service, which lets users upload their designs for selling to others. All offline services including payment, printing and logistics is handled entirely by MDS. Sellers are referred to as ‘campaigners’ and each product that is listed for sale is a campaign. A campaigner must define a time duration and a goal — the minimum number of shirts that must be booked within the specified time duration for the campaign to be successful. Only successful campaigns actually get printed.
One Platform, Two Targets
Aiming towards connecting two customer segments, MDS makes it very clear from the beginning that it is a platform for connecting buyers and sellers, with no implicit or explicit guarantee of either visibility or sales. This is important — without such communication, a platform runs the risk of running into a chicken-and-egg syndrome. Buyers want a selection of good products. Sellers want to attract more customers. And MDS requires both buyers and sellers in order to operate successfully.
With two distinct (although not mutually exclusive) set of users, it can become hard to identify whom to pitch to.
To solve this, MDS follows an approach which I like to call the ‘Bring your own customer’ model (a model which we at Ideafarms adopted for our own platform DealChaat).
Bring your own customer
Since the success of the campaign and profits are directly proportional to the number of shirts ordered by customers, campaigners are motivated to promote their products themselves. An interesting aspect of this model is that if the campaign fails, the end customer’s money is returned and s/he does not get the product — ensuring that even the end customer has a certain investment in the campaign. When I listed a design, a colleague of mine wanted it so bad, she went all out promoting it, and even convinced another colleague of mine to purchase it!
The Competition
MDS’s campaigner format seems heavily inspired by Teespring. In the past few weeks, at least one other competitor has surfaced — Mumbai based Printurn — its service identical to a T (sorry, could resist!).
The distinguishing factor
Although the campaigner format is the mainstay of the platform, My Dream Store also has a store format — where sellers can upload their designs without being tied down to a time duration or minimum goal.
This format has, in my opinion, a great potential, especially for a not-so-good marketer like me.
But for some reason, this is completely hidden from the end customer. Searching for a product in a store, or even the name of a store gives no results.
A Tale of Two Products
The Physical Product
Once a campaign closes successfully, the shirt is delivered in quick time, and is easy to track. All those who have purchased the t-shirt have given a positive response. I have been told that the colour bleeds a bit and the shirt shrinks a little on the first wash. However, these factors do not take anything away from the high quality of the shirt.
The Virtual Product (A case study in UX)
I have a love-hate relationship with the online tool for creating and managing the various campaigns. Part of the reason may be the fact that the tool was in its infancy when I began using it. I may even be partially responsible for breaking it — at the very least, I helped find and fix one bug ;) (more about that a bit later).
Getting the file right
One thing that really had me scratching my head and pulling out my hair was uploading a file. Here’s what happened while creating my very first campaign:
I read through the instructions, and sat down to create a high resolution version of my avatar — a paisley. I made sure the PNG file had the correct dimensions and then clicked on upload. What I expected was my design on a shirt. What I got was an error, “Too many colors, Unfortunately we do not support digital prints!”
A minor setback. I had a single colour version of the paisley with me, which I saved as an SVG and uploaded. This time I was told the file size was too big (~ 6 MB).
I scaled it down and exported it to PNG. This time, I got an error informing me the dimensions of my file were too big!
At this point, I must state that I was exporting the artwork to high resolution PNG. While converting vector graphics to bitmap, it is hard to control the number of pixels in the resulting file. And so I had to save my file a gazillion times trying to strike the optimal balance of high resolution file within the specified dimensions and with a low file size.
I eventually gave up on the paisley and switched to a simpler design — my mom’s kolam. I uploaded the SVG. This time it worked. After fixing the goal and the price, I hit the Confirm button. A dialog box popped up, informing me that my design was being saved. I clicked on OK and then stared at the screen. I waited for a while. Nothing happened. There wasn’t much I could do. I assumed that the page had hung, and I refreshed the browser.
(Last week MDS updated the tool and in the updated look, there is no OK button or an x mark to close the box. But even now, the user must simply stare at the screen wondering how long it will take to save.)
I refreshed the browser and created the campaign again. This time I clicked on Confirm. The shirt flipped briefly and then the page redirected to the next page.
It was then that I realised that I could actually upload designs for the front and back! I wanted to edit the design before publishing — only, there wasn’t any option for that. I used the browser’s back button, and got a blank slate to start over.
I looked around for the option to flip the shirt. Not having found it, I decided to publish it as is.
It’s all about communication
Spending the whole of my Sunday on the product must have been tiring. Because something happened. For some reason, the preview of my file stopped showing up. Several hours of refresh, a break, and another round of trials — nothing worked.
So I did what any sane angry person would do. I tweeted out.
MDS responded to my tweet on Monday morning, asking me to drop them a mail.
That Monday night, I sent out an email. On Tuesday, Arunlekha of MDS informed me that it was a bug which the team was working to fix. By noon Wednesday, she informed me that it was up and running, thanking me for reporting it.
In a span of four days, MDS went from an F to a B in user experience. Sure, the tool was flawed — it’s a piece of technology. User experience though is much more than that. A human voice that listened and cared for its users — no automated replies saying ‘we have received your mail and we’ll get back to you.’
Over the next few weeks, I had several such interactions. The personal intervention by real humans was what made the experience of using the platform a much more pleasant one.
Launching
With the bug fixed, I was excited to launch my campaign. And in my excitement, I overlooked the goal of my campaign. The default was set to 10, and it was with that goal that the campaign went live.
I passed the word around and supportive friends and family members ordered the shirt almost immediately. But it wasn’t enough. The campaign failed.
Relaunching
Once the campaign had ended, I checked my dashboard and found a few options next to my campaign. One of them was titled 1-click Relaunch. So I clicked it.
But instead of launching the same campaign, a duplicate campaign was created, with an identical description, goal and duration — but with a different URL. So while my campaign was active, I now had to circulate a new URL and those who had the older URL couldn’t purchase the shirt. While there was an edit and a settings icon, neither of them allowed me to change the goal or the duration of my campaign.
The not so frequently asked questions
My first reaction was to look towards the FAQ page. Sadly, it had nothing which explained any of the issues I faced.
The help desk
With the FAQ page not being very helpful, I decided to use the Contact Support tab on the side of the website. The form asked me to fill in my email address, name, along with my question. A little while later, I received an email informing me that an account had been created on mydreamstore, and that I had to reset the password. What just happened there?
It took me a while to realise that a third party ticketing system was being used by MDS. Nowhere in the Contact Support tab was it mentioned that I was actually filling out a form for creating yet another account.
As livid as it made me, I didn’t seem to have much of a choice. The response to the ticket simply was that the closed campaign was live again. The ticket was closed and marked resolved. Manual intervention, and a temporary solution, I assume.
The troubleshooter
A few days later, I sent the following email to MDS.
“I recently launched a campaign on mydreamstore, which had three orders. After the campaign was closed, I relaunched it. Unfortunately, instead of launching the same campaign, a duplicate campaign was created.
I had reported this issue, and the original campaign was reopened. However, there were still two campaigns with the same shirt.
Currently the duplicate shirt also has an order on it. I was wondering if it were possible for the orders to be merged, since they are identical.”
As before, email did wonders. My request was fulfilled almost immediately. Once again, it was the customer support that redeemed MDS for me.
The other customer
While I was experimenting and pulling apart the MDS campaigner system, there was one stakeholder that was kept in the dark the whole time. It is the end customer who has actually paid for the shirt, and is expecting, if nothing else, at least an assurance that the product will be delivered. Fortunately, I knew a few of them personally, and I could explain to them what was going on. They too were highly supportive, and told me not to worry about the delay. What about those who did not know me personally? I began feeling guilty of having let down a customer. Perhaps I should have tried out the system first, before publishing a blog post.
An unexpected success
For reasons unknown to me, I received an email from MDS asking me to send them high-resolution versions of the t-shirt’s design to them. I had spent countless hours uploading the right file — and here was an email asking me for another one. I sent it anyway, and received another polite thank you from Satish for providing good artwork.
The following week, the shirt made its way to the homes of the four wonderful souls who bought them.
I received a selfie of a family member wearing the shirt on Whatsapp. My colleague brought the t-shirt to work to show it to me the next day. Seeing the print and holding the shirt in my hand was a different feeling altogether. For me, it was more than just a successful campaign — it was the materialization of a long-standing wish. The highs of that unexpected success lasted for a while, during which I completely forgot about the frustrations of the weeks gone by.
The takeaway
If there is one lesson that can be learnt from the story of My Dream Store, it is that communication plays a much much bigger role in user experience. The MDS experience demonstrated the good, the bad and the ugly sides of communication. In the end, the little bits of good communication by friendly people outweighed the bad and ugly ones. But maintaining a clear message could have avoided pretty much every problem I faced.
Epilogue
This audit is by no means thorough. I haven’t covered other aspects of the dashboard or the store format. I haven’t yet claimed the profits I made on the campaign that was successful. When I do, I will update this part-review, part-audit. This review has taken several weeks to compile (ouch) and may sound a little disjointed — I will keep editing it, whenever I can, and updating it based on your feedback.
There may have been a few changes to the product that I may not be aware of. The product is still in its infancy and is evolving rapidly. The business model of the service is obviously one that is working, as is evident from the angel funding they received early this year, the active Campaigner Community on Facebook as well as initiatives like the ‘Freedom to Sell’ Sale in August.
A hat tip
Since you have been (hopefully) reading this for so long, I’ll let you in on a little secret. The campaign that did succeed didn’t actually reach the minimum number of sales required for printing. The folks at MDS were super supportive and printed the shirts nonetheless, with Karthik Venkat personally appreciating the concept of kolams on tees. A big hat tip to the folks at MDS!
Get a tee
If you liked this story, please do hit recommend, or better yet, if you would like to purchase a tee, here’s a link to the store on My Dream Store (currently available in India, international shipping will be available soon).
What about you? Have you used the service? What has been your experience? Are you from MDS? Do you agree/disagree with my observations? Feel free to leave your thoughts in comments and/or notes.
The author is a Senior Digital Designer at Ideafarms. Her other writing adventures and hobbies are chronicled in her personal blog— Musings of an Eccentric Mind
