Summer Sprint 2: Parallel Prototyping for Consumers & Local Businesses
Welcome back to our second sprint of the summer semester!
As mentioned in our previous post, our next steps were to collect results from UserTesting.com on our consumer facing app, as well as start creating our merchant prototype. Throughout the last two weeks, we have collected consumer testing results, and have spoken to 9 merchants about our ideas and how we could best help them during COVID19. We then went on to iterate on our consumer facing app idea, as well as the merchant facing idea.
UserTesting of Consumer Ideas
Having to switch from in-person interviewing/testing to all remote has been a great learning opportunity for our team. Our strategy was to first create a slide deck of our questions and screens which we wanted to show to users, and then run through the slide deck with people we know in order to confirm the questions made sense. This ended up being vital to check our bias of the project (Not everyone knows what a CLO is or what a merchant is) before submitting the test for feedback.
The results came back and we immediately began to analyze what people were liking and disliking about our idea. Here are some of the findings:
Overall — Overwhelming results that consumers would feel more engaged if there was a social aspect that included friends
- Sending deals and personalized recommendations to friends
- More trusting of friends’ opinions of local businesses
Users wanted more interaction between themselves and merchants
- Providing messages from merchants about deals would incentivize people to visit that local business
From these findings, it became clear what we needed to focus on, as well as create the additional screens to accompany our ideas for the consumer facing app.
Based on our findings, we generated additional screens for
- Connecting with friends on the app
2. Seeing saved stores on the profile page
3. Creating a top list
4. Being able to search on the map screen + list view
5. Clearer view of available deals & deals which could be sent to friends
Our next step with our consumer facing app is to create the information architecture and develop a click-thru platform for us to further test on UserTesting.
Merchant Testing
The second major goal of Sprint 2 was to start emphasizing the merchant facing side of our idea. We started by creating screens which we believed could best benefit merchants based on the findings in our research from the spring semester. We also had additional questions from the Spring which we needed answered in order to create a merchant solution which they would love and actually use. We felt these questions could best be answered if there was an artifact which merchants could have a conversation around. We crafted these artifacts to augment the questions and clarify what our team was trying to accomplish. Here are some of the questions and screens we made:
Merchant Testing Results
To test these screens we tested with seven merchants through the site User Testing. For two of merchants we required they own a restaurant, while for the other five merchants we required they owned their own small business. We also interviewed two local Pittsburgh clothing store owners. From these we were able to ensure a variety of business types.
We broke these responses down in two spreadsheets, one for recording the replies, and another for breaking them down and analyzing overall feelings. This was used to synthesize our findings in regards to what merchants needs were for the small business facing aspect of our project.
Our most notable findings were as follows:
- Overwhelming results that merchants need better and controlled way to send deals to users, and receive insights about their customers and how deals are performing
- Merchants have different and unique preferences about who they want to send deals to, and what types of deals they want to send: flexibility is important.
- Merchants really liked the ideas of friends recommending their business to others through a recommendation that includes a deal.
- Merchants like reviews and ratings, and find reviews especially important for bringing in new customers.
- Believed that seeing how users ranked their businesses in ‘top lists’ would motivate them to improve their businesses so they can continue to be on top lists.
- Most merchants want a way to send personalized messages to users regarding deals and inventory updates.
- Using a PoS system to manage deals was not ideal. Most wanted to use a computer or tablet.
Overall it seemed the ideas that would be featured in our consumer app appealed to merchants as well, and that merchants wanted to control different aspects of deals. Ultimately further testing will need to be done (TAP) to verify how exactly merchants would use the app and if that would align with their self-reported needs.
Creating the Merchant Screens
Based off our testing with merchants, we took our basic screens and iterated on those, as well as making several new screens. So not only did we build out screen to show the metrics, but also, how merchants would send deals, view the performance of the deals, send messages to consumers, and how they would set up their profile.
One feedback we got from merchants was that they was to control the demographics of the customers they sent deals/messages to. We realized this could potentially constitute discrimination by age, gender, and even potentially socioeconomic status (by zip code). We decided to have our filters for sending out these deals/messages be more sensitive to these potential issues.
Next Steps
We look forward to Sprint 3, where we will continue to test both our Consumer and Merchant facing ideas in tangent. We have developed several screens, but have not tested how they function together and the interactions between screens. For both merchants and consumers our next step is TAP (Think Aloud Protocol). We also have several questions for both Consumers and Merchants which we need answers to, like “What gets you to download ~another~ app?” or “What kind of relationship would you like to have with your consumers?”. We will see you again once we have the answers!
