v.
MARKETPOP!
Branding / Research / UX04-27-18
Collaborative Project
a.
BRIEF
After performing user interviews with a variety of small business owners, I designed a service that helps users quickly find relevant storefronts with a filtered search system, offers temporary workers with the "Extra Hands” program, and reduces risk with “POP! Protection” subsidies for business to reduce risk from the venture.
Currently I have hi-fi mockups of the websites screens, and am beginning the second round of iterations from the latest testing insights.
RESEARCH
While I was focused on the idea of an app to facilitate pop-ups, I started with research to focus and refine our solutions. I performed numerous research methods to inform my decisions:
- User Interviews
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Website Usability Testing
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Comparative/Competitive Feature Analysis
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Screener Survey
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Feature Prioritization Matrix
- Business Model Canvas
c.
ANALYSIS
This research revealed that financial risk was the biggest concern for small business owners. Small businesses often lack the manpower to run a pop-up, and small retailers want access to important but elusive legal information when entering a lease.
From my six user interviews, I crafted a primary and secondary persona to embody my target users. My primary persona embodies the “pitch-ready” entrepreneur who is looking to expand their business through pop-ups. My secondary persona embodies the risk-averse business owner who is looking for pop-up to safely test the market.
This information helped myself formulate my problem statement to focus on a single design:
Real estate companies often have temporary vacancies in their properties. Businesses of all sizes take advantage of these opportunities to create temporary storefronts called pop-ups to promote their company or to test out a new business model. Small business owners would benefit from hosting pop-ups to help their business adapt and succeed in fluid markets but owners are ultimately limited by time, financial capability, and labor when searching for temporary storefronts.
How might we create opportunities for small businesses to experiment with pop-ups while mitigating financial risks?
d.
PROTOTYPING
Based on the previous research, I refined the information into the following design insights:
e.
TESTING
Once I had a design, usability testing helps a designer to refine my product to be more user-friendly. I performed two rounds of usability testing, each with five users. The first round gave design iterations to refine our mid-fi wireframes as I brought them to high fidelity. My latest iterations will be included in the next steps to the project.
My testing included three tasks with the following results:
Moving forward from the prototype, there are many things that could be improved:
• Users had the most difficulty with the first task when navigating through the steps for searching for a storefront — Many users initially did not understand that the search buttons were clickable.
• People want more information and context about the business and its value proposition.
• The home screen should not have direct search features built in and should be devoted to explaining the business and its unique value proposition.
• Users wanted to log in first before searching.
• People want more information about the workers and who they are.
f.
REFLECT
The largest lesson from this project was continuing to emphasize the importance of business priorities in designing a digital environment.