Unidle- early stage product

Unidle

Sufficient second-hand marketplace through flexible and reliable trading flow

Unidle is an early-stage product design for an online marketing App aimed at tackling second-hand trading for college students.

Interviews and Existing solutions analysis were conducted in the early stages to identify the most vital user needs.

From low-fi paper prototypes, and mid-fi prototypes, to final prototypes, several iterations of design changes were made according to feedback received from usability testing.

Project Overview

Sector

Early stage Product Design

Project Time

3 months

My Roles

Interviews,

Wireframe,

Heuristic Evaluation,

Usability Testing,

Several iterations of prototypes

Design Process

Background

International or local college students who live in dorms often purchase lots of new household items when moving in, mostly similar types of items, such as textbooks, household wares, or electronics. A large numbers of such items are often go to waste after merely 2 to 3 years.

During the pandemic time, the already-serious waste problem has become especially severe due to sellers’ and buyers’ hygienic concerns and the rapidly shrinking social circles. Therefore, several researches were carried out to hopefully get us to a more eco-friendly and convenient digital solution that answers some of the most vital user needs.

Building Empathy

Interviews

To gain a deeper understanding of the needs and preferences we conducted interviews with college students.

Some of the questions we asked included:

When do students most likely need to purchase items or get rid of unwanted items?
How do students usually deal with such needs and how urgent is the situation?
What kinds of items are those usually? What is the willingness to purchase them second-hand?
What are some methods students currently use for second-hand trading?
What are some of the biggest pain points or concerns you currently have?
How did the experience help with building new social connections?
What support is desired from sellers and buyers?

Empathy Map

According to data gathered from interviews, we create empathy map to get an holistic view of users’ pain points and motivations to better retrieve insights into users’ emotional state.

Research Findings

Some common solutions college students currently use include:

Sell/purchase used items to local consignment shops with fixed percentage of consignment split or donate to thrift stores
University students' Facebook page, either leaving messages under sellers’ posts or communicating through private messages
Sending messages in international or exchange students' WhatsApp student groups or posting stories on Instagram
Mobile Marketplace App such as Carousell to trade via meet-ups that require coordinating specific meeting times and locations

By crossed-comparing the existing solutions and emotional and experiential aspects of users, we were able to identify several Market Gaps as well as Users Pain Points at the time that wasn’t fully fulfilled, and organized them all into 4 key design goals that answered such needs:

Represent Users

Based on our research insights, we group users' characteristics, goals, and pain points into segments to better prioritize goals according to students’ needs. This helps get our team on the same page and answer the most important question:

Who are we designing for?

Define Design Goals

As previously addressed, the Market Gaps and Users Pain Points we collected from research insights led us to formulate 4 key design goals that reflect such needs.

According to research insights, we believe that a secondhand trading App targeting College students would be ideal to answer the 1st and 2nd design goals. Therefore our key How Might We question remain:

How might we create a flexible, convenient & reliable second-hand trading experience for college students?

We then organize our findings from the 2 HMW questions according to levels of importance and feasibility, in order to prioritize our goals during the coming design phases.

We therefore decided that flexible delivering & transaction flow and feedback system will be the two key features of our product.

Information Architecture

We then listed out all primary features and our main design focus during the early phases.

Paper Prototypes & Findings

With low-fidelity paper prototypes, without much efforts, adjustments could be made before going into much more costly digital implementation.
A following example demonstrate the usability testing process of feedback system.

An improved iteration of the feedback system

More Usability Testing & Iterations

We then conducted several round of Usability Testing and noted down all the identified problems according to "10 Nielsen’s heuristics" with proposed solution, and labeled each with severity in or der to better prioritise them later during iteration phases.

Design Decisions

Transitioning from Mi-fi prototype to Final prototype, design decisions are made to address issues identified in usability testing and heuristic evaluation.

Decision 1: Purchase flow redesign, Top & Bottom Navigation bar restructured

Problems

Lack of differentiation between current and potential future purchases: While testing out with frequent second-hand items consumers, we noticed that they tend to first take time browsing through a variety of items and potentially save it for later. They wish to cross-compare between different items or sellers before making a decision, and they may leave items in their cart from previous shopping sessions for long, even if they didn’t intend to purchase immediately. Therefore, we realized the single Cart function itself may not be flexible enough to provide both needs of “items interested ” v.s. “items ready to purchase”.

Solutions

“Favourite” -> “Cart” -> “Order”:
Add a “Favourite” section for users to keep track of their wish list of items they are interested in, and keep the “Cart” section for items they are ready to purchase. Users can then move items from their favorite list to the cart freely when they decide to make a purchase. A direct “Buy” button is also available on the product info page and search result page, giving users the freedom to proceed to checkout directly.
Grouping items of the same buyers into the same card and only allowing orders of multi-items if only they all belong to the same card (buyer), since different sellers might offer different delivery and transaction methods. Such constraints make sure that each seller-and-buyer pair sorted out the most convenient delivery and transaction method according to their wishes.

Decision 2: Profile Page grouping info in tabs & layout consistency

Problems

Alternate back and forth between different sub-views:
Instead of having to navigate between different sub-pages of the same hierarchical sections, users prefer alternating different views of related contexts while staying on the same page.
Inconsistent Profile pages:
Profile pages of others and of users themselves should be consistent in layout, keeping similar sections at fixed-location to reduce the effort for users to understand the structure when just arriving at the page.

Solutions

Use tabs to alternate between views within the same profile context and provide a clear indication of the currently selected tabs.
Keeping brief user info fixed while allowing switching tabs between: purchased items, current order, received comments for “My Profile” and published items, received comments for “Others’ Profile”. Keep two profile pages consistent in layout for better predictability for users.

Style Guide & Design System

Final Prototype

Map view