On My Block
The Challenge
We have observed that information about local boutiques is often disorganized and untailored to individual shoppers, which makes it difficult for patrons to locate and support boutiques that align with their interests.
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The Goal
The project focuses on creating an app that enables individuals to find and support small businesses. We prioritize building a relationship between residents and local shop owners where both demographics can share their stories and personal interests.
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My Role
I defined the brand and created the wireframes. I also facilitated the user interviews, created the prototype and presented the project after 4 weeks of development.
Great idea, But how did we get here?​
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Our team was tasked with identifying everyday needs that people face. After brainstorming, we identified common themes around COVID, social impact, and supporting businesses, specifically boutiques. In light of the difficulties that boutiques face today, we want to design a mobile application that enables people to identify and patronize boutiques in their neighborhoods.
User Research​
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As user researchers, we wanted to understand what factors impacted patrons' decisions when shopping. We conducted 4 interviews with individuals who shop locally and are environmentally conscious.
Our research objectives were:
1. To discover how often are community members patronizing local stores in their neighborhoods
2. To find out how people commonly identify boutiques to shop at or support
3. To find out how COVID has impacted shopping habits
Online Survey​
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We wanted more data for our research so our team conducted a 10-question survey. We discovered that most people consider company values when shopping. Majority of them would rather shop in person and usually find local stores by walking around.
Through our interviews and surveys, we found that...
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Patrons who want to support local boutiques need a better way to locate and learn about them. Shoppers have limited time to explore their areas and limited ability to browse in-person due to COVID.
User Persona​
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We created a persona after gathering the insights from our interviews and surveys, we had a better understanding of who our target users will be which will help our team make better design decisions that will satisfy the users' needs.
Competitor Analysis​
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We then look at our potential competitors after gathering data from the interviews and surveys to identify what is currently working well for users and compared their features with the expectations of the interviews in mind. ​
The following 6 competitors were selected. We noticed that almost every organizations included product reviews and comments on their apps.
After comparing the apps, we realized that the areas that we wanted to focus on were:
1. Authentic reviews and comments
2. Including photos from customers
3. Building a community page between customers
4. Creating an informative business profile
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Feature Prioritization
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We created a feature prioritization matrix to prioritize the features based on our interviews and surveys. ​ We found that users wanted an app with authentic reviews from real customers, a positive community amongst buyers and consumers, and informative business profiles to support and purchase from the business.
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Our Opportunities​
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How might we help patrons locate small businesses that align with their interests so that more people will shop from the local stores and support the community?
User Flow​
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There are 2 main features we created for our user flows based on the features we selected from our feature prioritization.
1. Search: Users will be able to search for products/businesses and support their store.
2. Community: Sellers and buyers will be able to create their profile and share their stories.
The user flow below highlights an essential feature in our website that allows the user to find more information on any products and businesses they are interested in. The users will be able to save the business page to their collection for a future reference.
Wireframes​
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We created our sketches based on our user flows and transformed them into low-fidelity wireframes. We then conducted user testing using our low fidelity prototype.
User Testing​
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We conducted three user tests for our low fidelity prototype. The goal of this testing was to determine if users could navigate through the website smoothly and feel more compelled to support their local businesses. There were 2 main tasks that we tested:
1. : Registration and Onboarding
2. Searching for an item using filters, then bookmarking a business profile
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Some common issues we found throughout the testing were:
1. Registration: Users felt that the onboarding process was too long with too many questions. We then took out some of the steps.
2. Filter: Users were having a hard time finding the filter function. So we made it more visible.
3. Filter: Some users couldn't find the filters they had selected. So we moved the applied filters to the top of the business profile page.
Last but not least...​
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On My Block is an app created in hopes to bring support to small businesses during this hardship. I hope to be able to develop this app in the future and help many community members with their businesses. As we were developing On My Block, we took in consideration on our users feedback from the interviews and research. For our final high fidelity prototype, the features we decided to focus on include building the filter system and search feature.
Final Product​
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Our team designed high-fidelity wireframes based on our research and testing. After many iterations, we were able to create our final product.​
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Moving Forward
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There is still a lot more to explore with On My Block.
Some of the features we want to build out in the future are
1. Adding more options to the filtering process
3. Building out business profiles layout
4. Improving map features
5. Building out the community page
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Success Metrics​
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To measure success, we will track:
1. Daily Active Users
2. Amount of purchases per profile visit
3. User Retention Rate
Reflection​
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On My Block was a personally meaningful project as for it was my introduction into product design, in which I have gained numerous practical experiences. I learned that design is dynamic and constantly evolving, but the one thing that holds true is our goals and vision. Through this process, my empathy with users widened with each iteration of the product. I genuinely believe this product can improve quality of life by building stronger community connections between consumers and small businesses.
