During my semester with Codergirl, we were tasked with developing an app while learning the User Experience process. The ultimate goal was to create an application that solves a problem. I designed “Nab”, a shopping app that allows you to shop from anywhere and then drive-thru to pick up the items you ordered. This came to me as I was experiencing life as a new parent. My baby took her best naps in the car, and I often found myself driving around town, but accomplishing nothing. How great would it be if I could make that time more productive? There are plenty of shopping apps that let you order delivery and pick-up, but most are for food, and when picking up you have to leave the car to obtain the items. What if you could order anything from anywhere? What if you never had to leave your car?
THE APPROACH
The first step was to determine if there was actually a need for a service like this, and who would use it. I developed a series of questions and interviewed a few people.
First round of questions:
Do you prefer shopping online or in stores?
Why do you prefer that?
What do you think about delivery apps? (grubhub, postmates, instacart)
Which ones have you tried?
If you could make them better what would you do?
(or) Why haven’t you tried any?
How often do you use these services? Why do you use them?
What do you think of drive-thrus?
If you could get drive-thru from anywhere, what kind of stores would you go to?
Would you be willing to order ahead to pick up in a drive-thru?
My sample group was quite small, and ended up not being representative of the group of people I needed to find. I had to change the questions around to get information from them that I could use. If they, typically, don’t use shopping apps and drive-thru, would they be willing to with the right application?
I then created a survey that I posted on social media, in hopes of getting a larger sample of users. After I gathered a fairly good sample of people, I collected the information and created an affinity map so I could see any similarities in shopping behavior, pain points and positive experiences that I could use while ideating my app.
Affinity Map outlining results from interviews and surveys
Using the information I gathered from the survey and interviews I created two personas.
Now that I had identified my personas, I reached out to someone who fit them. I asked them to walk me through their journey of a general errand for household goods. As they talked about their experience I mapped out their reactions, pain points and actions in a journey map. This helped me really pinpoint how the app could be useful for general shopping experiences.
The journey map was incredibly useful for storyboarding. I could see the ups and downs of a typical shopping excursion and draw that out to help myself better understand the process someone would go through to utilize my app.
Now understanding the very basic usage of the app, I could get started on working through the app’s user-flow. I roughly sketched out the screens as I saw them flowing. I focused on a couple of minimal flows just to get an idea of where these interactions could take me.
Once I had the user flow wireframes sorted through I put together a paper prototype to test functionality. The paper prototype was illuminating in that it illustrated the need for more steps in between the main ideas of my initial sketches. You can test it out here.
High Fidelity Prototypes
Using Adobe XD I worked out the design and flow of my app.
After some initial testing and critiques with my peers I reevaluated some of my approach to the app. I moved where the user would first login and added more points of interaction to enhance the usability. I originally had all of my navigational items in a minimized menu, where they were essentially useless. I moved those down into a navigation bar to make it easier for the user to get to certain tasks. I also redesigned the overall look of the app. I wanted to keep the app accessible but wanted it to be more attractive.
Usability Testing
Once I nailed down the fundamentals of my app I created a usability test script and tested the app on three users. Overall the test went well but there were a few friction points that I needed to iron out. Between the initial version and the second version I moved where the user would first sign up/login. In the version the user tested, this created some confusion. They were on a path to start shopping and were suddenly interrupted to sign in. I moved the login page further into the process so that it would flow into the check out. I also learned that I had failed to include enough steps between finding a category and narrowing down the search options. Overall, usability testing was invaluable to working out the kinks in the user flow.