Key Contribution
User Interview,
UI/UX Design,
Prototyping
Team
Jiayuan Li, Kevin Yang, Leif Zhang, Rachel Chen
Advisor
Kojo Boateng,
Theo El-Kattan(Stakeholder),
Henry McNeill-Njoku(Stakeholder)
Time
Nov 2022-Dec 2022
Context
Known Source is a Second-Hand Fashion platform for second-hand dealers and fashion lovers. Consumers can browse and purchase second-hand clothes from trusted ‘Dealers’ on Known Source. After purchasing, consumers have the option to renew the item by returning it to Known Source, which will then find the item a new owner.
My responsibility is to lead research and design in a team of 4 to improve the shopping experience through dealers.
Overview
Stage 1
Research Phase
Business Goal
We interviewed Theo, the founder of Known Source, to learn about their core design needs and to confirm that what we were designing matched their needs.
“Hard to differentiate Known Source from competitors.”
“Hard to connect between the website, dealers, and customers on known source and lack of human touch.”
What contributes to the dealer’s style ?
How might we connect users with their preferred dealers' styles for seamless product exploration and purchasing?
Connecting Design To Business
During the interviews with the team members and founders, it was clear that we needed to improve one important thing: the dealers’ pages. Clearly presenting the dealer's fashion tastes was important not only to make them have a better shopping experience but mainly because it was attached to the most important business goal: curating a community of top dealers.
Prioritization
According to the business goal, impact, and cost, we decided to solve dealers’ problem first: Users don’t know how to buy products through dealers
Key Insights From Interview
For users, the most important thing is to understand the dealer’s style. So we are wondering What contributes to the dealer’s style. Through user interviews, we learned users’ habits and preferences, which guide our design.
Yiting prefers to see product images, especially those of typical products
Kevin is more interested in knowing the street style of an outfit
From the observation, we noticed users never read the textual descriptions
Pain points
We interviewed 6 people and gave them 5 tasks based on real shopping scenarios. Based on observations and interviews, we made an affinity map to summarize the main pain points below.
Difficult to understand exactly what Known Source does
Users don’t know how to buy products through dealers
Hard to navigate
Stage 2
Ideate Phase
Brainstorm potential solutions
Dealer’s cards consist of typical products ✅
Image-based introduction and Style badges ✅
Filter dealers by style ✅
Provide a survey to help users understand their style and recommend the dealers ❌ (Stakeholders’ feedback: Don’t want extra development effort)
User flow
Buy products from a dealer who matches their fashion style
Sketches
Before moving onto high fidelity wireframes and mocks, we created several potential solutions by paper wireframes.
Wireframe
We redesigned 6 pages including homepage, product page, dealers’ page, about us page etc.
Stage 3
Design Phase
Redesign Dealer’s Card
Pain point: Unclear Dealer Style on homepage
It is hard to tell what the dealers’ style is from their name and one picture on the homepage. So, it’s hard to find a dealer that matches her style.
Solution: We provide a bigger card to show more info, including dealers’ typical products, to give the users a glimpse of dealers’ styles.
Overview
Problem 3 : Text-heavy dealer introduction
The user thinks there could be more dynamic photos for dealers like rotating images to give users a better idea of their style
Solution 3 : Image-based introduction
We provide a carousel of several street photos of Celebrities in the dealers’ cloth to help users learn the style more intuitively instead of the text-heavy introduction.
Overview
Design system
My reflection & Take-aways
We made a mistake during our process. After user interviews, we found that the current visual style was not well-liked by users. We tried to address this by changing the visual style, but during the meeting with stakeholders, we learned that they had invested significantly in this branding. Changing the visual style would affect not only the website but also other elements. In the end, we did not prioritize a visual style redesign and instead proposed designs that resolved usability concerns using the existing style, which the stakeholders approved.
This experience taught me the importance of active communication with stakeholders and prioritization. It is critical to balance user feedback with business considerations such as branding investments and to find solutions that address both.