UX Design Immersive — Project 2 Write-Up
Adding E-Pay technologies to LetGo
Overview
LetGo is a free, person-to-person, mobile classifieds app, which launched in 2015. It allows users to buy from, sell to and chat with others locally. It’s signature is its no-frills ease of buying, selling, and exchanging goods. Currently, the app only supports you in getting your item out there. The actual contacting, meeting, and paying is left entirely between users. This is great for some, but a bit of a barrier for others.
“Oh gosh, you mean like some kind of drug deal?” — one of our interviewees, speaking on meeting with a stranger for a cash transaction
My Role
Along with three of my cohorts of the General Assembly UX Immersive Program, we assumed the roles of well-rounded UX Designers. From screener surveys to filter out potential research candidates, to interviews, to designs and usability tests, we spent over 50 Hours improving the LetGo user experience by adding an e-pay function to the app.
Screener Surveys
We asked 10 different questions, ranging from general demographics, to more specific behaviors like buying used items online. We wanted to interview a user base that represented LetGo’s actual market. As such, we interviewed 7 men and 3 women, all between the ages of 18–34.
Synthesizing Interview Results
After our interviews, we had a ton of data to pour over, from a variety of questions:
- “Tell” me about your experience with online shopping?”
- “Can you tell me about the last time you sold something used-online?”
- “When you sell items online, how do you prefer to be paid?”
When I was conducting interviews on my own, I found myself a bit skeptical of the merits of Affinity Mapping. It seemed like i’d already had a lot of ideas in my head, and the map was just a tool to justify my own preexisting assumptions.
In the group setting, those feelings took a complete 180. I was only present for about a third of the interviews conducted, so the four of us being able to come together and collaboratively pool and group our results was amazing!
What were the results?
TRUST!
Trust in from the company your purchasing from, trust in your payment method, and trust in the person that you’re meeting with to make a transaction were all critical for users to feel comfortable linking something like their bank account or credit card to a site like LetGo.
PROBLEM STATEMENT
With our synthesis in front of us, we had a clear problem statement to go from:
Considering the popularity of both used and new-online shopping that doesn’t involve meeting up or exchanging money directly…
How might we ensure that our users still have the trust and incentivization to make in-person transactions?
From our problem statement, we were able to start to form solution, or at least what we thought a solution might look like:
And who might this solution be for? I thought you’d never ask.
Our personas:
Now, with a clear problem defined, solution proposed, and users to design for, we could finally get to the good stuff…
ACTUAL DESIGNING!
The fruits of our design-studio-labors were low-fidelity wireframes. We wanted to ensure that our user’s trust was a top priority, so all of our new features were focused on addressing just that.
You can see the progression from early sketches, to low-fi wireframes, all the way to high-fi, prototype-ready screens, below:
With each screen similarly “hi-fi’d”, we were ready to link the screens together, and begin our usability testing.
USABILITY TESTING
We conducted two rounds of usability testing, each with four different users. They proved extremely useful, and we were able to make large changes:
