Particular Audience
Bringing a mobile solution that tailored to online shoppers' needs
Client project
My Role
I led a team of 2 UX designers on a 2.5 week sprint, collaborating on research and taking lead on strategy, client management, and design. Our research findings and design are currently being evaluated and developed for the new "similar" app
Project Skills
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Client Management
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User interviews
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Contextual Inquiries
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Competitive research
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Personas
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User journey mapping
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Feature Prioritisation
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Ideation (Sketching)
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Prototyping (Figma)
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Usability testing
Bringing a mobile solution that tailored to online shoppers' needs
Our client, Particular Audience is a software management company that focuses on delivering relevant content to the end-user.
Currently, Particular Audience is in the process of launching a Chrome Extension tool that enables users to compare products and discover coupons.
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On top of the Chrome extension tool, Particular Audience is also dedicated to bringing a mobile product to customers with a focus on electronic products to start with. Particular Audience is considering to implement a camera feature that enables users to visual search.
We worked with Particular Audience to mainly research and design a mobile product that tailored to the needs of online shoppers. We delivered a series of concepts and design (mid-fi prototype) that are currently being evaluated and developed for the new "similar" app
Design Process
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Design a mobile product tailored to the needs of online shoppers.
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The Brief
User
interviews
Contextual
Inquiries
Usability testing
On Current Chrome
Extension tool
Affinity
mapping
Survey
Synthesizing
Persona
Customer journey
mapping
Competitive
Analysis
Features
Prioritization
Wireframe
Usability
Testing
Mid-fi
Prototype
Usability
Testing
Deliverables
MVP
Mid fi Prototype
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Understanding online shoppers' habits and shopping behaviours
Gain insights into users’ online shopping habits and the end-to-end journey to identify user’s goals and frustrations
User interviews
Usability tests
Test the current chrome extension product to discover any immediate pain points that users are facing. Also to gain insights into users' shopping behaviours.
Survey
Gain quantitative data to evaluate key findings from user interviews.
We recruited 16 online shoppers in total for user interviews and usability tests.
16 Online shoppers in total
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Age 21- 40
An equal mix of age, gender, relationship, and family status
11 Young adults/Budget shoppers
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Usability testing with target audiences for the current chrome extension tool.
Shopping habits and behaviours
We use an affinity map to organize and synthesize the research results to find patterns and create themes. We grouped our results into two themes, which are online shopping habits and the end to end journey of online shopping.
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We discover that some shoppers prefer to shop online cause its convenient and some prefer to shop in-store. Shoppers prefer to use mobile and desktop to shop online, so we dig deeper into it in our survey question to figure out more about the shopper behaviors and how shoppers interact with different devices when they shop online.
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There are multiple factors shoppers consider when shopping online, so we use a survey question to get more insights into which factors shoppers consider as important when shopping online
Key findings
There are multiple factors shoppers consider when making a decision to purchase something online.
price and rating & reviews are the important factors shoppers consider when shopping online
Shoppers take multiple steps and go to multiple platforms to compare products.
Shoppers prefer to use laptop/desktop to research and compare products.
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when designing a desktop experience, it’s important to highlight the research and comparison features to tailor to user needs.
Shoppers prefer to use Mobile for browsing and financial transactions.
When designing a mobile solution, it’s more about delivering solutions to shoppers rather than research or comparison.
Shoppers use mobile to search for a better price when shopping in-store.
Our survey result indicates that 86 percent of shoppers go online for shopping purposes when shopping instore and prefer to use mobile.
We created two persona based on the key findings from the research. We separated our user types based on the device preferences and shopping habits and behaviours.
The mobile deal hunter
Our primary persona for the mobile solution is "the deal hunter" who finds it hard to navigate all the online options. She heavily dislikes researching and prefer to use mobile when shopping online.
She wants an effective way to find the best product that suits her needs (such as product recommendation) and the quickest way to find the best price for a product that she likes. She values price, reviews, rating and returns policy.
The well-informed desktop bargain shopper
Our secondary persona for the mobile solution and primary persona for the chrome extension is "the well-informed bargain shopper" who does a ton of research before making a purchase decision and prefers to use a Laptop/desktop.
He wants an effective way to find the best price for a product that he wants to buy. He values price, estimated time of delivery, and warranty.
Identifying pain points and opportunities
We used a journey map to visualize the process of our primary persona "deal hunter " and secondary persona "the well informed bargain shopper" trying to buy a new 4k monitor online.
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For our primary persona, her pain points occur during the search and compare phase. The opportunities here for Particular Audience include, providing product recommendation outline features a product offers, offering deals and detailing the original price and highlight the saving.
For our secondary persona, his pain points occur mainly during the compare and browse for a better deal phase. The opportunities for Particular Audience include helping users comparing products and finding the best offer, offering deals and potentially notify users when there’s a relevant deal.
How may we?
We used How May We Statements to brainstorm ideas and features to implement in our design.
Enable shoppers to find better product offers?
Help shoppers to find the best solution?
Improve online shopping experience?
Prioritsing features
After consulted with the lead developer about technological and cost constraints, We used a impact-effort matrix to prioritise features. We includes features with a high impact feature with the low effort level in the MVP and further categorised other features into "should have", "could have" and "won't have" based on the impact and level of effort.
Generating design ideas that tailored to users need
In the early design stage, we sketched out a few ideas of the MVP features and how they were going to fit into our design.
We created wireframes to test. We did a few usability tests on the wireframe to identify usability issues early on in the design process progressed to a mid-fi protype for further testing.
Homepage that include recommendations and key product information (Price, rating & reviews, shipping information
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Product page showing discount, estimated time of delivery, shipping cost and pick up availability
Product list page showing key product information
A camera feature that enables users to visual search (searching with images/photos/screenshots).
Usability testing of the mid-fi prototype with online shoppers
We conduct usability testing with 6 online shoppers. The concept was received well and met participants' expectations. At a higher level, our participants gave us feedback on the recommendation, filter function, product information and camera feature.
Users suggested that they want to know what “Top picks for you” and “hot deals” are based on. We made the titles more specific and more appealing to shoppers
Next step - More usability test on the product recommendations
Users suggested they would like to see more options and "sort by" in the filter
Next step - Further usability testing & Information architecture
Users suggested that the pricing information should be enlarged. Users wanted to see some detailed production information and were confused about “add to cart”
Users are not familiar with the camera feature and needed further instructions during the usability tests. We added a few instrutional features
Next step - More usability tests on the camera feature. Add instructional features (Pop-ups, a short demo
Video etc)
Client Feedback
Our team handovered the research results and design to Particular Audience. Our client was impressed with the amount of work we have delivered in 2.5 weeks. We've involved clients in all the decision making process. Particular Audience is currently evaluating and our concepts and design for the new "similar" app. Our recommendations for the chrome extension tool are currently being implemented on a live product.
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Next steps
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More rounds of usability testing and iterating
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Information architecture (product categories, filter options)
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Hi-fi prototype
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Evaluate the camera feature through usability testing
Learnings
Client management is one of the key things I learned from this project. In the beginning, we were unsure of the exact scope form the brief client gave us as our client asked for a mobile solution but unsure why. However, after consulting with our client, we were able to confirm the scope and effectively plan end-to-end research. I've learned a lot from communicating with the client on how to balance the user experience and business goals. It's important to start every task by first understanding why it's important not only for the users but also for the business as well.