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Localu

Designing an app to help small business

Fields: UI/UX Design | Product Design | User interviews | Competitive Analysis | Wireframing | Design Systems | Info. Architecture | Prototype | Testing

Tools: Figma | Figjam | Miro
Background
Localu is a 4 week team project I worked together with Daniela Ocklind and Gaetano Roffi at the UX/UI Bootcamp in Barcelona Code School.
Our objective
Our aim with the app is to promote easy local shopping and local business visibility within their city or neighbourhood, helping small shops to survive against online big market places.

Problem Statement

Local retail business owners are finding themeselves side-lined by competion, especially in the e-commerce landscape as they do not have the necessary resources to dissuade globalization ideologies. This in turn has a negative impact on local communities, robbing them of their social choesion in their local area.

Long Term Goal

For local business owners to easily establish their brand/product online and for customers to get any product locally-sourced straight away.

Discovery

The research started with group brainstorm to frame our project objectives & discuss what we would like to know about the problem:

In order to find some answers we began with a desk research, investigating the current e-commerce and it's impact on shopping.

Survey Forms

We created a survey form that was sent out to a sample of 16 local business owners in Barcelona in order to gather some quantitative data to better guide our case study.

User Interviews

We did 16 semi-structured interviews with local store owners in Barcelona.
Our subjects revealed their concern about the pressure in adapting to e-commerce due to the pandemic and changes in customer habits.

Research Sypnosis

Most local retailers make use of large e-commerce platforms or have an official website where they showcase and sell their products online. These were some common points:

  • Delivery cost on e-commerce platforms sometimes is higher than the product cost
  • An official website does not always guarantee higher store sales or product visibility
  • Social Media is widely used by all subjects as a way to advertise their products and increase visibility.

Top features local businesses would like:

  • Easy to use/Didactic
  • High store and product visibility
  • Regular updates and promotion
  • Syncronization between stock & online procucts
  • Reliable and cheap delivery service

Define

After we compiled the outtakes from the research, we decided to design an e-commerce app for local business owners with the following characteristics:

User Persona

At this point we were able to create a persona that represented the main user group:

Ideate

After realizing what solutions & features would bring the most value for our users, we started sketching and building our site map, running a card sorting session to test it.

Task Flow

After having defined the features of the app and the IA, we created flows for the main tasks to test the core functions:

Style Guide

Each team member created a style guide for the app. We went out in the streets to do a guerilla A/B testing of which styleguide citicens of Barcelona would prefer. This is the one that got more votes:

Prototype & Test

Go here to see the full Hi-Fi prototype
Positive points:
Negative Points:

Conclusion

Our mission was to create an e-commerce app that could be used by retailers in their local community by making it easy-to-use and introducing features of collaboration between business owners.
During the process I learnt the importance of testing with real people and the benefits of iteration. Seeing that the 'community' feature' was met with mixed responses, it proved the importance to test and keep the research on mind: this community is willing to survive economically, therefore they're ver protective and focused on their own profits and costs, so this feature on the app would require further investigation in the next sprint cycle.

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