SWOOOP

A mobile application that provides a seamless shopping experience to support local small businesses

Overview

Small local stores can't easily afford to launch digital platforms to offer online shipping and delivery services. There is an opportunity for local retail stores to be able to compete with larger chains by offering curbside and in-store pick-up options.

By providing a central platform for local businesses to showcase their products, users can easily shop, purchase, and track their orders in one place while being able to support small businesses in their communities. SWOOOP is our design solution to help empower local retail stores and provide a seamless shopping experience for their customers.

Role

Product Designer, Researcher

Duration
18 months

Skills & Tools
Competitive Research, Interviewing, Storyboarding, Experience Prototyping, Figma, Photoshop, Illustrator, Procreate

Challenge

How might we empower small local stores that are struggling to compete with larger chains and help increase their business?

Solution

We created a central platform for local businesses to showcase their products. Users can easily shop, purchase, and track their orders in one place while being able to support small local businesses in their communities.

Shop

by store or by item

Purchase multiple items

from different stores

Track

status of all orders

Process

01
Understand the Problem

Background Research

In May 2020, we began to think of ways to help struggling local small businesses during the pandemic and decided to research the topic to understand if this was a problem worth solving.

We discovered that 98% of retail in the US consists of small businesses. We also learned that consumers found it inconvenient to know what products their local small businesses offered because they lacked an online presence to showcase their goods.

83% of shoppers have expressed an increased willingness to support their local businesses since the start of the pandemic rather than large corporations. 8 out of 10 of them are willing to spend more at their local stores.

By providing a solution to bridge the gap between small businesses and these consumers, we saw a way we can potentially help these struggling businesses to survive the pandemic.

Defining the User

Comparative Analysis

We wanted to define our user - which are consumers and small business owners. We then identified existing applications that are tackling similar problems. Postmates and Amazon are our closest competitors as they are either already or starting to provide the sale of retail goods while offering delivery and pick-up options. Postmates and Amazon allow both small and large businesses to compete in the same platform, making it harder for small businesses to stand out.

User Personas

User personas were created based on our Demographics from our key competitors to identify the types of consumers and small business owners to interview.

Understanding the User

Affinity Diagram

The personas helped us interview a mix of shoppers and LA local store owners. We asked them questions about their online shopping habits and needs and found commonalities in several of their answers.

Both shoppers and owners need a convenient shopping and selling experience
Both sides want to save money however possible (through shipping, delivery, deals)
Both parties want a peace of mind about their purchases and sales being correctly fulfilled and that great customer service is provided

Customer Journey

We analyzed how Postmates delivers a successful customer experience since they offer in-store pickup at brick & mortar stores.

This image shows the existing customer journey of a person ordering food for delivery. We found that the simple user flow of searching, purchasing, and tracking orders created a seamless and enjoyable user experience. This helped us empathize with potential customers

02
Identifying the Opportunities

Updated Customer Journey

The customer journey map helped us identify some opportunities that could be addressed in our product.

Most of the pain points from the Postmates customer journey were from the delivery experience so we wanted to address this issue in order to elevate the customer experience.

By eliminating delivery, we saw an opportunity to build a product that can potentially help increase profits and customer conversions for small businesses.

03
Design Process

Storyboarding

We storyboarded a scenario of a cat owner who needs to buy cat food ASAP. This person would go on the app, search for cat food options nearby and be able to compare prices. She then quickly purchases a product from a small local store, is notified when her order is ready and picks up the item from the store.

This helped us define the key tasks of a consumer interacting with our product. We conducted more competitive research and analysis of several existing shopping platforms to further inform our design process.

Sketches

Since most online shoppers use mobile applications to do their shopping, we focused on mobile-first for our consumer-facing product.

Our main features were the ability to ‘shop by store’ or ‘shop by item’ and the ability for shoppers to seamlessly shop, purchase, and track their orders.

Usability Testing

We transformed our low fidelity wireframes into a digital prototype and conducted virtual usability testing to measure the success of our sketches.

We gave the users a task to complete but only half of them were able to complete it.

Although users liked that they were finally able to view the available products at nearby local stores and the ability to track when their packages were ready, they had trouble navigating the prototype smoothly. Most of them didn’t know that they were able to shop by item since we initially only had this feature after clicking on the search bar.

Low-Fidelity Prototype Testing

Iterations

We reworked the structure of our user flow to simplify the landing page.

By clearly separating the ‘shop by store’ and ‘shop by item’ on the landing page, shoppers can quickly select their preferred method of exploring their local stores.

We conducted another round of testing after reworking our low-fidelity wireframes. 100% of our users completed the task in the second iteration.

Low-Fidelity User Flow

Low-Fidelity Wireframe

Low-Fidelity Prototype

04
Final Design

Hi-Fi Prototype

After our iterations, we felt comfortable in creating a high-fidelity prototype.

The product is a central shopping platform for local small businesses to showcase their products. This application would also help consumers explore small local businesses within their community while staying safe during Covid.

Consumers will be able to easily BOPIS multiple items from different local stores and track when their orders are ready to be picked up in-store or curbside - therefore eliminating delivery to increase profits for the small businesses.

High-Fidelity Prototype

Conclusion

To conclude, working on this project has continued to prove that in order to create a great product it is important to empathize with users from inception and throughout the design process.

It’s easy to assume a solution to a problem will work, but there is so much value in listening, rapid prototyping, and iterating. We learned how to better observe and listen to users as they interact with our products so that we may see and feel our products through their eyes with the hopes of making their experience better.