PotSale project
Overview:
I started a personal project aiming to develop an e-commerce website for these potters to use to sell their products locally. I envisioned making a more user-friendly business side, by including marketing help and easier bulk uploading, to encourage all the senior potters to sell online.
Team:
Myself! It is a personal project.
My Role:
UI/UX Designer & Researcher
Timeline:
4 months, Oct 2022 - Jan 2023
Still working on new features.
Tools used:
Problem Space
In my spare time, I like to do pottery. Hence, I met a potters’ community in the Waterloo area.
I observed that lots of my potter friends, especially the elder ones, have attempted selling online due to COVID-19 but have given up in the end. I was curious about the reasons behind this and wondered if there could be a better e-commerce platform tailored to potters.
From some quick talks, main issue is around the complicated uploading process for individuals and groups, as well as the lack of support in proper marketing skills.
Hence, the problem statement is as follows:
Build a platform that allows Kitchener/Waterloo Region potters to sell products online with more ease and marketing help.
Interview findings analysis:
Complicated Uploading:
All potters mentioned the desire to minimize the uploading and logistics time. The same time consumed could be spent on making pots which would be way more enjoyable for potters.
Lack of Marketing Support:
Potters are not professional marketing experts, especially when most of the potters are elders who expressed their concerns about understanding little about their younger buyers. They need support other than plain words and tutorial videos.
User Research
My Research Goal for user interviews are:
understand potters’ mindset and current procedures of online ceramics sales
Look for pain points and potential areas to improve and explore in the process to
Attract more buyers
Enable more effective promoting
Have a more efficient selling process so potters can use more time to work on crafts
Results:
4 interviews with 2 more experienced and 2 less experienced online pottery sellers.
“Taking measurements, taking photos, and writing descriptions...And loading it all up...things can vary a fair amount...It is most time consuming.”
“Potters need to “have half of the time hands dirty””
“Need to be a photographer, marketing, we need to wear lots of hats.”
“My content strategy is. Not very well formed, I think. As a artist, I’m not.”
Users are also baffled by the idea of needing to be good at a lot of things to carry out a successful sale, such as taking good photos, knowing how to price things, etc.
Analysis:
Seller Persona:
Some of the needs of the Seller group are:
Upload products easily
Both individual products and bulk uploads
Suitable for not-so-high technical background
Have guides and tips for marketing
Preferably not text or long tutorial videos
Avoid the extra cost and time effort into shipping and logistics
Competitor Analysis:
Shopify:
Etsy:
I also gathered some complaints from the seller's side for both Shopify and Etsy.
Long setup time
Unreasonable steps in product uploading
User Journey Map:
I created a user journey map to organize which part of the flow has the most friction that I can prioritize.
Lots of troubles happen at:
Product Uploading Phase
Need for marketing and producing good visuals and copy
Shipping Phase (not in scope)
Wireframing:
I started by putting my research findings to HMW questions:
How might we improve the process of uploading a single product/multiple products?
How might we introduce marketing knowledge to people effectively?
The focus would be on
provide more guidance with customizable templates and break things down into steps to allow users to have a better understanding of the current situation.
tools that can create better content. Examples can be an image editing tool that marks dimensions, a gif generator, a QR code generator, and so on.
from one of the interview participants who claimed “Online sales need so many extra steps like taking good photos, naming, uploading to another website like gify.com to generate gifs, and more”. I envision that if we can include it in one product, it would make life much easier.
Prototyping:
Feature Breakdown:
Input Flows
User feedback:
“Now things are clearer to me... where I am at...”
Collection:
User feedback:
“I think that might work better than the current long spreadsheet...at least it became the same process as individuals...”
Dimension Widget
Widgets:
Generate image outcome to put on their website
customize their dimension image
User feedback:
“Interesting idea that can possibly help in various ways, like not only for dimensions... sometimes for me I saw these beautiful images from other people, I tried and failed.”
It could also benefit a group of people (which is one of the future directions) to perform uploading on individual ends and compile them together.
Addressing HMW#1:
How might we improve the process of uploading a single product/multiple products?
For individual products we have...
For multiple products we have...
Addressing HMW#2:
How might we introduce marketing knowledge to people effectively?
For marketing support we have...
Design Guidelines:
Solution Verification & Testing:
I did my testing with potential users for the product.
Script
I recruited 5 actual potters in Kitchener Waterloo Area, 3 having online selling experience and 2 without experience. I sat down with them one by one for an hour to go through more general questions about their experience, prepare for later iterations, and conduct usability testings for the current design.
I received an average of:
Time to complete single uploading: 4 minutes and 48 seconds (benchmark 4 minutes)
Time to complete bulk uploading: 2 minutes and 30 seconds (benchmark 4 minutes)
SEQ Score: 72.4 (benchmark 80)
SUS Score: 5.8 (benchmark 6)
Heatmap for a widget
Protocol:
Some of my main Usability Goals would be:
Validate their understanding after seeing the new uploading flow.
This consists of
Time needed to complete the task of
Uploading
Bulk upload
Both uploading features have a success benchmark of 4 minutes, as this is the research results on the minimum time needed for uploading products using Shopify.
Qualitative reviews
Verbal Feedback of understanding (no quantatative benchmark)
System Usability Scale (SUS)
Success Benchmark: 80
Single Ease Questions (SEQ)
Success Benchmark: 6
Analysis:
It is a great start as well as a bit bitter to see some results miss the benchmark by a bit.
The recorded time for both uploadings did have an outlier as one of the testers would try to brainstorm and tell me her mental model during testings which drag the time to more than 7 minutes. However, since we used widgets, this time does go into preparing which creates some errors and biases as the benchmark is 3 minutes with all images and assets prepared.
I also received other good qualitative feedback: the users did like the innovative approaches to solving the project on a more systematic view instead of replicating a known troublesome way. Each widget and step, after explaining, did receive positive feedback such as: “they might help a lot” or “I would love this”.
Results:
Redesigns:
Smoother Learning curve:
Addition of instruction pages
Home Screen:
More consistent shading and color shading
Clearer Feel
Better data visualization
Accessibility:
Larger Font size for elders
Reduce amount of information
Next Steps:
This is a personal project still in progress so there are lots to be done. As the uploading feature has a full iteration, the next steps would be validating individual widgets and doing internal comparisons on each, with potential further research. The next feature I would tackle would be marketing posts as the assumption is it would increase retention of both potters and consumers, fostering a strong pottery local community online.
In the future, I would try to render out the customer end of the platform with more research data from surveys and interviews with consumers.
Takeaways:
I learned a lot from this project, especially by starting and maintaining a design system of my own. Although I didn’t start from scratch and used a design library in the Figma community, it is still lots of work to figure out the styles and interactions I desire.
Further Explorations:
I am continuing my path with this project by doing a few UI screens relating to this project. You can see them at Visual Playground.