A Curated Thrift Store Experience— UX Case Study
The Opportunity:
The secondhand shopping sector in Canada offers some truly surprising statistics. In 2017, $28.5 billion in second-hand transactions were made, with a massive 2.3 billion items changing hands.
Whether it be to shop more economically, or find a unique vintage product or piece of clothing, the secondhand market and thrifting is continually on the rise.
Myself and a team of two other UX designers wanted to see how we could find a synergy between the ever-growing scale of the secondhand market, and the always profitable e-commerce sector. We would be conducting research, planning, and designing up to mid-fidelity wireframes for an e-commerce store. Our timeline for the project was 2 weeks.
Research
The Objective:
Here in Vancouver, BC you don’t have to go far to find a thrift store. We wanted to find out what motivates so many people to buy secondhand goods. As well as any positive or negative points in the thrift store shopping experience.
We set about gathering this information in three steps. Visiting local thrift stores to conduct a contextual inquiry, deploying a short survey online, and conducting more detailed interviews.
Contextual Inquiry:
The contextual inquiry served as a way to get a “boots on the ground” view of how real shoppers go about their time at thrift stores. Our contextual inquiry confirmed many of our assumptions, as well as backing up our own secondhand and thrift store shopping experiences. With at times an overwhelming amount of stock in thrift stores, the main behaviours of shoppers was to go to their desired section and browse from one end to another. We did not observe that there was any “plan” the shoppers had beyond this.
As for the stock found in the many shops we visited, clothing was by far the most popular category of items. This was followed by shoes and accessories. At many of the stores there was a large selection of household goods such as furniture, books, movies, and children’s toys.
Survey:
Equipped with more information after completing our contextual inquiry, as well as many brainstorming sessions we deployed a short, 12 question survey.
The purpose of the survey was to gather data that would be used further in the design process. Our questions aimed to find out our respondents’ overarching demographic, shopping habits, as well as their views on thrift store shopping, both positive and negative.
For our demographic focused questions, we found that there was not a single gender, employment status, or age group more likely to shop at thrift stores than another.
Our questions aimed at discovering motivations and frustrations for thrift store shopping included the following:
What factors motivate you to shop secondhand?
- Price, the chance to save money on items by purchasing secondhand
- Variety, the ability to look through a wide range of products
- Social and environmental consciousness, support non-profits by shopping at their thrift stores and lessening your environmental impact by recycling or upcycling a product
What factors deter you from shopping secondhand?
- Cleanliness, this was the top chosen result, many thrift stores do now have the ability or resources to fully clean and prepare every item displayed in the store
- Item Condition, an obvious concern when buying secondhand goods is the condition an item is in
- Can’t find items, as found in our contextual inquiry the amount of stock kept in most thrift stores can be overwhelming
In addition to finding the high and low points of the thrift store shopping experience. Our survey also began to find out what may be able to make thrift store shopping more positive.
What would make secondhand shopping more appealing?
- Curation, the majority of respondents chose that they would prefer better curation, the chaos of a typical thrift store is not always appealing
- Online shopping and delivery, this option could increase convenience for many and it was a popular choice
Interviews:
While waiting on the results of our survey, we conducted a few interviews. These would help us dive deeper than the survey would allow and into the psyche of those familiar with the thrift store environment. From the manager of a thrift store to a customer who just loves the thrill of the hunt for the perfect purchase, we were able to gain some valuable insight.
Our first interviewee is a thrift store “power user.” He regularly visits thrift stores for the love of the “scavenger hunt” as he called it. He offered that he lightly has an item in mind just 20% of the time, the other 80% he treats it almost as a hobby. He shops at thrift stores to find great deals, but when asked, he wasn’t interested in seeing what his savings were over purchasing new. He would love if there was a new arrivals section at thrift stores, as he visits regularly and it would make his search more convenient.
The second person we interviewed is the manager of a thrift store. The store he manages is in a smaller community and is one of the few places you can easily buy clothing nearby. He sees a lot of parents with children, as well as a lot of newer mothers pushing strollers through the store. He noted that he is often asked if they carry a specific item in a different size. As the thrift store model works off of keeping stock of many one-off items, they do not have multiple sizes of the same product.
These interviews allowed us to start brainstorming potential features included in our e-commerce shop. As our survey closed and interviews were complete, we were ready to move onto the next phase in the design process.
Planning
Affinity Diagramming:
In order to begin the planning phase, we had to distill our data into more easily usable form.
We utilized an affinity diagram. Writing data points onto sticky notes and sorting them as a group allowed us to begin finding trends and gave the opportunity to start designing with our user in mind.
Persona:
The creation of a persona allowed our team to more easily gain empathy for the users we were designing for. Sarah represented the averages of our research. Her motivations and frustrations about thrift store shopping echoed what our survey respondents and interviewees had to share.
Sarah was easy to begin designing for, as we felt we all already knew a Sarah or shared similar thoughts to her.
Feature Prioritization:
We then decided on the features most needed on our site to address the users pain points and enhance their thrift store experiences. We thought of potential features that our users could benefit from and organized them into three groups based on our project scope and timeline.
Must Haves
- Search and search filtering
- New arrivals and featured items
- Product condition rating scale
- Product photos and descriptions
- Countdown feature; in order to maintain more reasonable levels of stock, we ideated that products would only be available on the site for 30 days and then would be donated onwards
Nice to Haves
- Blog
- Customer Testimonials
- Sale/deals section
Not Needed
- Customer service chat
- Savings calculator
- Environmental impact calculator
Site Map:
Through all of our research we found that clothing was by far the most popular category of goods stocked and shopped for at thrift stores. Keeping this in mind and wanting to offer users features such as fast and affordable or free shipping, we decided to focus primarily on clothing for our online store. This would also allow us to adopt a more streamlined rating system that is applicable to the majority of products in stock.
User Flow and Scenario:
“Sarah is shopping online for clothing more suitable to warmer weather as the season is about to change.”
As Sarah is an avid thrift store shopper, the above scenario was created as a way to design a user flow that would be followed when visiting the site. The user flow allows us to get a better idea of what pages will be required to be designed for our minimum viable product at the end of our 2 week sprint.
The flow allowed for searching for a product via categories, filtering down the listed products, and adding to the shopping cart. After it was in the cart, the user would be able to check out as a guest and after completing the order, create an account.
This user flow could easily be adapted to fit any product on the site, making it a great starting point for the next phase of our design process.
Design
Paper Prototypes:
Paper prototypes allowed our team to quickly layout pages that would be in our final delivered mid-fidelity prototype. The design of the site was aiming to evoke a modern and familiar e-commerce feel. Products would be listed with high quality photos and easily selectable categories and filters.
User Testing
The paper prototypes were then tested by randomly chosen users. The frustrations that inspired design changes are listed below.
- Collapsible filter panel, to allow larger product photos when the filter is not in use
- More robust pop-up when item is added to cart, allow users to edit cart or proceed to checkout easily from the pop-up
- Clearer category hierarchy on dropdown menus
Mid-Fi Design:
The final mid-fi prototype shows our solution to the opportunity that was presented to us. The site shows clear information hierarchy and offers a modern and smooth e-commerce experience for its users.
Invision Prototype:
Please take a look at the clickable prototype on Invision!
Conclusion
Future Considerations:
As we were working in a 2 week sprint, we weren’t able to design and implement every feature that our team was hoping to put in our prototype. Some future considerations we have are the following:
- Further expanding the countdown feature, surfacing items soon to leave the store on the homepage
- Responsive site design, to further aid in convenience for users on a variety of devices
- Developing the item and monetary donation feature
Closing Thoughts:
Undertaking this design challenge allowed us to build on our UX skillsets. Following the order of research, planning, design, testing, and prototyping allowed us to design while creating and maintaining empathy for our users. Personally, I enjoyed working with my teammates Vivienne and Jisu. Our different backgrounds allowed us to bring our own experiences and perspectives to the design process.
Thank you for reading!
