current project:
TrueFlip
Our mission at Trueflip is to take the local shop and sell marketplace and make it seamless and effortless for both shoppers and sellers. We act as the middleman by providing the service of item pickup, item inspections, and delivery in two days or less when an item is sold. All payments on Trueflip occur online and are safe, funds are held in escrow and paid out to sellers once the item has been inspected for accuracy.
Co-founder and product designer, occasionally acting as product manager when needed.
Management: Sprint Planning, Backlog Grooming, and Sprint Retrospectives
UX Analysis: Design Thinking, User Research, Tasks Analysis, and Persona Building
Visual Design: Branding, Website, App Designs and Illustrations
Prototyping: Low-fidelity prototyping, High-fidelity prototyping, Animations
QA: Administrative Maintenance and Quality Analysis
To build the most streamlined shopping and selling experience for users. Our goal was to increase conversion rates by 5%-10% for what we defined as a user's critical path within 8-weeks. Critical path is defined as a user successfully listing an item for sale and/or making a purchase. We measured the conversion rates using Mixpanel funnels.
Having that vision in mind, we created concept personas with two archetypes based on current users and utilized it to influence our product direction and decisions. Our research and vision meant that we had to look for specific buyers and sellers to onboard onto our platform. We found ourselves asking: "Who do we want selling And who do we want shopping?"
Going into the project, we knew that it would be important for us to prioritize key features that would make the most impact in increasing the success rates of our critical paths. We conducted usability testing on the current workflow to help identify key pain points that we could quickly iterate on.
The biggest pain points discovered during our usability tests were that a lot of members were having a hard time searching for an item to list. In addition, uploading and taking pictures was not as intuitive as it required the user to go back and forth to add additional images. We also found that the tips that were shown to first time sellers were intrusive to the workflow. Note: we timed the users when listing an item and it averaged out to around 1 minute and 54 seconds for them to complete the workflow.
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The biggest pain points discovered during the shopping flow was that shoppers had a hard time figuring out if an item was priced fairly. Often times they would price compare by searching the item on Google. Shoppers have also expressed through feedback that it was difficult for them to locate the item if they wanted to come back to it later, there was no option for them to return to the item unless they messaged the seller.
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Having discovered the pain points, we hosted a brainstorming session to curate a list of possible solutions that we could implement. Needless to say, we ended the meeting with a large list of ideas. Now we needed to prioritize this list and determine which features would be the most effective in at increasing our critical path conversion rates.
In order to help us prioritize we created user stories and answered these basic questions for each user story, example shown below.
We organized the user stories onto post-it notes and used a whiteboard matrix to help prioritize by business needs, as well as user needs.
Our app is built using React Native, we were informed by our devs that the React Native team would be deprecating their current navigation and switching over fully to a new navigation package with an updated set of guidelines. We took this opportunity to really dive into our current navigation system and revamp it to follow the new guidelines. We decided to research and follow best practices in the industry when iterating on our navigation.
White boarding the current user flow we used a red marker to pin the identified pain points and noted the changes that we would include to improve the workflow.
Working in tandem with the devs, I created an updated workflow and annotated the design changes in a different color to make it easier to note the changes.
Taking what we learned from our user research, we highlighted items that were sold at a discounted price on the browse feed and reinforced it on the item view page. In addition we added an option for shoppers to bookmark an item which could then be easily found in their profile section. As a method of creating urgency, we showed the number of people viewing the item on the item view page.
On the checkout page, we made the pricing breakdown more accessible. We also flipped the information required to include the payment type above the address knowing that the delivery address would already be pre-filled. To decrease the amount of scrolling on the page, we consolidated all the help information into overlays that were easily accessible by tapping on the “?”.
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Tips are now integrated seamlessly as a dropdown modal on the custom camera view. We minimized the view for suggested items to list and allowed the user to browse our item categories in addition to searching for it.
We created a custom camera view and gallery view to allow users to select and take multiple images at once before uploading, this made the process a lot more streamlined. By moving the primary call to action to the top right of the navigator, we are able to converse valuable real estate, which was useful for long description fields.
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We contacted the individuals who took a part in our initial usability test study and ran a similar study using the same scenarios. Here was some of the feedback that we got!
We were ecstatic that many of them expressed that the improvements to the workflow made it a lot easier for them to navigate and understand. Shoppers expressed more confidence in the item that they were viewing and were immediately drawn to the design changes. Having timed the sellers during the listing flow using the prototype, the average time to list an item dropped by 20 seconds (this is with an additional 10 seconds added because it’s a prototype).
To conclude this case study, using task analysis and usability studies we were able to identify pain-points in our critical workflows and adapt our design and UX to improve the user experience. In addition, we navigated our way through a technical diversion by using it as an opportunity to further improve our UX, but also keeping in mind that our primary goal was to conversion rates on our critical path. This project is set to release soon and we’re confident that our conversion rates will steadily increase with the improved user experience.
Our overall vision is to be the best place to shop and sell locally. Our vision can be broken into three main concepts that we believe must be achieved on the product level. These concepts make the marketplace both safe and convenient for our members.
