Project 4: Fulfilling your overseas goods desire
This project was one where we were able to come up with anything that we wanted. Thus, our group settled on an e commerce service where one would be able to use returning overseas travellers to buy goods available overseas and have the travellers bring the goods back as a cheaper and faster method compared to current methods.
The brief:
Singapore Post has the opportunity to further boost its eCommerce leadership by extending into Peer-to-Peer International Marketplace leveraging its extensive logistic network such as vPost (International Shipping) and PopStations located island wide. Our redesign should meet the goals of the users, the goals of SingPost and its existing brand.
Tools: Sheets, Trello, Slack, iMovie, Quicktime, Omnigraffle, Sketch, Principle, Keynote, Numbers, a lot of Post-its
Who are the users?
We proceeded to create a survey screener. This was so we could identify users who had done online shopping, had bought products overseas on behalf of others as well as had asked people to buy products overseas on their behalf. We wanted to interview these people in particular so that we could conduct an in depth interview with them to identify the issues that they faced.
These were the questions we came up with as well as the analytics of the responses we had:
https://drive.google.com/open?id=0BwsJZ_Kp8sJPM0RscTBvT1k2NmM
Based on the above, we identified candidates for interview. These were the takeaways that we had after interview them:
How to organise these?
We proceeded to carry out an affinity mapping exercise to identify commonalities among the points that our interviewees had mentioned so that we could identify common issues among our interviewees and come up with a list of features that our service needed to have.
What do the users want?
We proceeded to create three personas based on our interview findings. These personas would help us to understand the users’ problems and the processes that they currently go through in order to solve their problem of obtaining goods from overseas.
We decided to use Carol the Foodie as our primary persona as our survey findings revealed that food was the most requested good to be brought back from overseas. We created a job story that Carol would go through in order to obtain a red bean Kit Kat from overseas. We also proceeded to create a user journey map so that we could understand all the steps that Carol would go through currently.
Competitive analysis
Where do we stand?
We also looked at the services that were currently available to users. These were SGShop, the Singapore agent for Taobao, Carousell and Airfrov. These were the closest competition to the service that we wanted to create.
We carried out the user flow exercise in order to understand the steps that one would have to go through to order a good on this service. This way, we could understand where one could remove or simplify certain processes in order to make the experience a much smoother and better one for them.
IA: Appmap
We created an app map based on Airfrov as this was the closest competition that was currently available. We wanted to understand the critical steps taken by our three personas as they fulfilled their tasks. This would help us understand which were the key features to keep and prioritise for. As seen from the above, the critical feature that was needed by Carol was a way to post her request as well as access messages from travellers that had offered to buy her items and respond to them appropriately.
What do we build first?
Having gathered all this data, we ranked the list of features that our personas needed on importance and frequency and prioritised those that were important and frequently used in order to create a Minimum Viable Prototype for user testing.
Wireframing time
Based on these, we sketched out a version 1 on Sketch and used Principle to create a rudimentary prototype.
Version 1
The task that was given to our testers was that of posting a request for red bean Kit Kat on the prototype. We wanted to see how users interacted with the prototype and their thought processes when carrying out the task.
Before carrying out usability testing, one must have a plan. This was our usability testing plan and the steps that we took.
Feedback on v1
Based on the user feedback that we garnered, we made changes to the prototype and created a version 2.
Feedback on v2
And this is the final prototype!
Here’s the link to the interactive prototype if anybody wants to try it :)
https://drive.google.com/open?id=0B_BQ_6SU2-akTkZHWGVYTHZ6TVU
After presenting our work, we were told of two major issues:
- We had considered everything from the buy side but had not thought about the traveller flow.
- Our usability testing was flawed from the beginning as we included the copywriting text in our user testing instructions. Argh!
Key takeaways from this project:
- Consider all possible angles
- Check, check and check again
- Communicate better