Overview
Workshop in Business Opportunities “WIBO” is a non-profit bringing small business development workshops to undeserved communities since 1966. WIBO’s mission is to enable small business owners and budding entrepreneurs from underserved communities to obtain financial success by starting, operating, and building successful businesses that develop economic power, provide jobs, and improve communities.
Challenge
The challenge is to design an intuitive and effective way to engage the WIBO business owners to be able to register, create profiles, set up their product and/or service pages to be able to sell on the e-commerce platform.
Process
To better understand the context in which WIBO alumni run their business, we began our explorative research by conducting 8 hour-long interviews through video calls and in-person.
Solution
We focused on 3 crucial pieces of the process:
Set up profile
Add Social Media Integration
Simple & Single Screen Account Creation
.png)
Motivation tone and gamify experience
We made the onboarding and listing process more engaging by using friendly tones and gamified the experience.
Flexible Listing
Business owners can add their information whatever they want.
Click to see prototype
My contribution
Product strategy User research UI design Wireframe Prototype
The team
1 × product managers 4 × ux consultant
Year
2018
Research
Research
Conducting User Interviews
At the discovery phase of the project, we conducted 4WIBO and 4 non-WIBO business owners interviews in order to understand the landscape and their pain points while running their businesses.
After conducting the interview with BO, our team used an affinity map to organize many ideas into groups with common themes or relationships. It helps us to analyze large amounts of data and discover relationships which allow a design direction to be established based on the associations.
Key Insight
- Business Owners are time-poor
- Level of tech-savvies vary
- Mobile is the primary device
- Importance of social media integration
Competitive Analysis
We analyzed 10 e-commerce sites by comparing registration and on-boarding processes as well as key features of 10 e-commerce direct and indirect competitors. The goal was to define the most popular and useful features across different platforms and outline those that would work for the WIBO project
Some of the questions we were trying to answer:
- What are the “star” features of these apps?
- How does collaborative selling work on these competitive platforms?
- What is the visual structure and user interface of these platforms?
Key Insights
- only 1 platform out of 10 is offering services for sale (something that our customers need)
- 8 platforms offer pre-designed layout to save time and effort for busy entrepreneurs
- 9 platforms offer internal inventory management tool
- only 4 platforms have social media integrations available
Stakeholder Feedback
After our research presentation, the stakeholder expressed that they gave us a more advanced user-base than they originally intended, we should also target users were:
- Recent graduates from the WIBO program
- No experience with facilitating their business through e-commerce channels
.jpg)
How might we make a seamless experience for WIBO alumni despite different levels of tech and e-commerce knowledge?
Ideation
User Flow
We created a user flow diagram to map every step of the user interaction required to achieve the main goal of the platform. Creating a user flow helped me to get a more defined sense of the big picture for this product. I could see where the key interactions would take place and where the three main user flows needed to be developed.
- On-boarding process
- Setting up an account
- Listing a product
Brainstorming Sketches
We sketched each iteration and added the elements and screens that were necessary to reach users' goals, to quickly see which ideas worked best. As we sketched the process, the onboarding process became clear to us. Through the sketches, I could test different features, building from ideas generated in the brainstorming.
Mid-fidelity Wireframes
We created a mid-fidelity prototypes to test the designs with users and understand how the solutions works based on the insights.
We used Sketch and Invision to create low fidelity prototypes of two essential processes
- On-boarding
- Listing a product
User Testing
All participants had different business backgrounds and tech proficiency, which allowed us to collect extremely useful feedback on the prototype.
Goals of the user testing:
- Is the guidance provided for the onboard, set-up, and listing processes helpful and clear?
- Is our integration offering a valuable feature to users?
- How can current features and content be improved for users? .
Key Insight
The majority of users liked the presence of guides to facilitate their storefront setup. They were all pleased to see social media integrations.
- Exhausting and draining process to register, create profile, list, sell
- Struggled to find the right button to click to complete the task
- Struggled with the categories section
- Users were not familiar with e-commerce terminology
Changed based on user feedbacks
Add Progress bar
Users are confused within a flow.
Add info icon
User are not familiar with e-commerce terminology
Add “Other” to the category
Users struggle with the categories section. We eliminated the sub-category and collect detail category list through the tag system.
Takeaway
Research is a must
I couldn’t have designed a product users love without the help of the people who will actually use it. The user survey revealed unexpected information and made it possible to adapt the product to users’ needs.
The user is always right
Conducting user testing and evaluating users feedback at various stages helped me to discover and eliminate pain point at early stages.
