Case Study of Aurea Galga: A Local Vintage E-Commerce
Overview
E-commerce is well-studied in the industry, so for this project, we will devote the most of the research time doing market research and conducting a competitive analysis. We will be focusing our efforts on delivering great online shopping experiences for the end users.
Introduction
my first project was a means to learn UX concepts like the design thinking process and its brief was kind of very broad, however, this project was practical and technical. Going through the empathize, definition, prototype and testing — design thinking process — however made it easy to divide the whole work into sizable tasks which were easy to take on
For this project, we (with my team) used the kanban project management system(trello) to manage the project
The deliverables for this project are low-fi and mid-fi prototypes
For this project,our brief was to identify a local small business and improve the online experience for their customers.
Problem Statement
My team and I worked on Aurea Galge, a Spanish vintage online store.
The major problem we tackled, which we discovered from conducting user interviews, was that online vintage shops don’t show realistic information on their websites and this usually results in lack of trust and bad reviews to the businesses.
Users & Audience
For this project, our audience included both the stakeholders and the users. As business analysis is just as important as user research.
For the business analysis, we needed to understand the business from a stakeholder’s perspective. Fortunately for us, we had access to the owner of the business. Her name was Leire Ipsy. Vince — a member of my team — interviewed her.
For our target users, we created primary and secondary personas to understand them. But due to time and resource constraints, our features were implemented based on our primary persona. Both our primary and secondary users were young professionals — so they could totally afford vintage clothes. However while our primary users love shopping for clothes, our secondary users purchase clothes only out of necessity. More of this under ‘process & what you did’ subtopic
Roles & Responsibilities
For this project, four of us (Vince, Maritina, Rosa and I) worked on the project but there were no specific roles. We collaborated remotely. We used figma to work on the project and google meets, slack and zoom to interact.
Scope & Constraints
We had to work deliver up to mid-fi wireframes in four weeks. It was helpful that we only had to dwell on pages that would help our users achieve just one action. Which in our case was purchasing a black dress.
Process & What you did
Business Analysis
To understand the business, we conducted stakeholder interview and competitive analysis.
We asked questions that would help us understand the role of our stakeholder, what motivated her into starting the business, who her target customers were, the opportunities she perceived in the market, what she did before starting this business, as well as her business’ brand.
Leire loves aesthetics and worked in a concept store. She loved working in a concept store but it was too expensive to recreated so she developed Aurea Galga as a second-hand version of a concept store. Hence her brand isn’t marketed as second-hand but vintage since her products were high quality pieces that would last longer. Which would consequently tackle fast-fashion dilemma. Since Aurea Galga is a second-hand concept store, she would love to fashion pieces that have themes like love, personal growth, fostering greener environment and self-acceptace. Her target customers are women in their 30s because they know what they want and also have loads of cashhhh🤑
Leire discovered the problem that information of most vintage products online are not realistic which we also confirmed through our user interview.
The image above is Aurea Galga’s logo and its colour is inspired by the deep blue sky which meant that the brand is creative and not limited by conventional opinions. There’s a balance between straightness and curves in its letters to signify the minimalist nature of the brand
We performed a feature and brand competitive analysis to understand the threats and find opportunities in Aurea Galga’s marketplace. We only chose direct competitors which were Depop, Etsy, Vestiaire Collective and Grailed.
Leire didn’t want her website to have a filter feature as an attempt to replicate how people browse through old relics in physical vintage stores. But from our user interview and competitive analysis, we discovered that users would rather find something quickly on a website and so the filter feature was a must-have.
From the feature competitive analysis, we had multiple feature ideas to include in our product. But because we had to take considerations of our users which we clearly defined in our persona, we successfully figured out the features that would achieve the goals of our primary users using the MOSCOW which I would talk about later.
User Research
Due to the time constraint of this project, we only conducted 5 user interviews and no survey. Using these interviews, we used affinity diagram, empathy map, user persona and user journey map to deeply understand our target users.
From the affinity map, we discovered that the time it takes to find cloth pieces online mattered to our users. We also discovered that the not-so-accurate sizes, and unappealing and unrealistic images of some vintage products online bothered our users that they would rather buy vintage physically. Our users are also willing to shop for vintage clothes for sustainability reasons
User personas were developed to understand the motivations, frustrations and needs of our users. Just like I mentioned earlier, we developed two user personas: the primary and secondary user personas. And while both of our personas were young professionals and could afford shopping, our primary persona is a frequent clothing shopper while our secondary persona only shops for clothes out of necessity.
We could notice some key differences between our personas. For instance, Gianmarco, our secondary persona is skeptic about shopping for clothes online while Ornela, our primary persona regularly shops online for clothes. Also, while Gianmarco hardly buys unique vintage pieces, Ornela likes to collect vintage pieces. So although we are obligated to treat similar frustrations of both personas like unrealistic information of products online and the stress from returning products purchased, we are more focused on the pain-points of our primary persona. This is because our primary persona is our priority.
Finally, we used the user journey map to understand the experience of our users while interacting with our product — our website.
This user journey focused on our primary persona. This map entailed the journey of Ornela to find the perfect birthday dress and leave a review after purchasing it. During first stage, she found a dress on social media and was redirected to the website. At one point though, she had to return a dress cos the size of the dress was not hers. We saw an opportunity here which led to the automated size calculator feature which I would discuss later.
An interesting point to note is the touchpoints. From interviewing our users, we discovered that our persona loves browsing for dresses on her phone but prefers paying on a bigger screen like a desktop or tablet.
Define and Ideate
After empathizing with our users, we defined the problem and ideated solutions taking into consideration the goals and pain points of our primary persona. We used HMWs, MOSCOW, MVP, Site Map, User Flow and User Stories to ideate. The problem statement was developed from the hypothesis statement which is important to validate the problem statement.
Problem Statement:
“Our website was designed to help young professional women find a piece of clothing they would love. We have observed that the online vintage shops ae not showing realistic information in their websites which is causing low conversions low retention and bad reviews to our business”
Hypothesis Statement:
“We believe providing detailed and realistic information for young professional women will achieve them buy our products. We will know we are right with 80% conversions and 60% retention rates.”
We further divided our problem statement into three mini-problems — using the HMW — we would love to tackle. HMW means How Might We statement is an attempt to brainstorm questions that would prompt us to find opportunities in our problem statement.
Together we generated these questions: how might we help Ornela find the right product size? How might we help Ornela find the right category? and How might we help Ornela see better the quality of the materials?
Then from these questions, we brainstormed features that would answer them.
After brainstorming, we wanted to find out the most important features that would turn our website into an MVP. That is, it would solve our users’ problems while at the same time wouldn’t be too much that it would overwhelm our users. To achieve this, we used the MOSCOW method
Using this method, we were able to determine the features which are a must-have for our website and yet keep it as simple as possible.
After determining the minimum necessity on our website, we developed a sitemap and userflow.
A sitemap is necessary before building wireframes because we can view the relationships between the contents on our website and imagine how our users would navigate through the website.
We developed our user flow so that we can project the paths our users would take to navigate through our website in order to perform a particular task. For our user flow, the task was to buy a dress.
Prototype
Now, we sketched our low-fi using our userflow. We first made our concept sketches and then deliberated on the screens we created and what task they should perform. We used Maritina’s concept sketch for our deliberation
We developed low-fi wireframes using balsamic which you can check here
We couldn’t test our low-fi but we tested our mid-fi wireframes. One of the things we changed is the cancel button from the being the same color(grey) as the proceed to the color of the background screen (white). This is because we didn’t want our users to click the cancel button.
Below is the protype of our wireframe.
Outcome & Lessons
It was really fun working with my teammates and I learnt many figma shortcuts and better understanding our users from them.
