Hoopooh, a Berlin-based startup offers daycare centers a parent/teacher communications app. For this project I would work in a pair with Bianca Darienco over a two-week period. The project would go on to win Ironhack's award for Most Creative Solution.
Background
The Challenge
Project Balance
Research
Interaction Design
Visual Design
User Perspective
We wanted to determine what parents’ purchasing behaviour looked like. It quickly became apparent from our secondary research that parents are most likely looking for the best solutions at the best possible price, often actively looking for discounts online (diaper deals, for instance). Meanwhile, our quantitative and qualitative research of 50+ parents (85% millennial) seemed to confirm those findings, even steering us towards the ever-growing second hand market.
We wanted to determine what parents’ purchasing behaviour looked like. It quickly became apparent from our secondary research that parents are most likely looking for the best solutions at the best possible price, often actively looking for discounts online (diaper deals, for instance). Meanwhile, our quantitative and qualitative research of 50+ parents (85% millennial) seemed to confirm those findings, even steering us towards the ever-growing second hand market.
Already buy or are interested in buying second hand
Find price to be determining factor when buying online
Find sustainability important but don’t know how act so
sell used items online in some capacity or are open to it
User Persona & Journey
With the insights gained, we could formulate our user persona and journey mapping to derive the specific painpoints our would-be users face when shopping for child products.
Problem Statement
With our research findings, user persona & journey clearly outlined we had a good idea of the direction we'd need to move into. Formulating a problem statement would ensure we would stay on the right track towards designing our feature:
In this scenario, our user is both looking to sell and purchase items on the Marketplace. As such we created a ideal user flow for this experience. A parent, Anouk, now aware of the new Marketplace functionality and logs on to sell an item of clothing belonging to her son. Once the item is listed she looks to find a new winter jacket for him.
Marketplace flow
MVP & Feature Prioritisation
The goal of Hoopooh’s Marketplace feature, at bare minimum, is to help parents sustainably purchase and sell their children’s unwanted clothing, furniture and toys. By leveraging Hoopooh’s own community of users, we will create a trustworthy and intuitive marketplace for them to buy & sell items which they need or that they don’t have space for.
The Redesign
Brand Elements
With our project being an additional feature to be added to the existing Hoopooh app, our stakeholder explicitly asked us to maintain styling to conform to the existing app's look and feel. Without an existing style guide we had to dissect what was already there in order to have a guide for our coming UI work (example screens below).
The clear challenge with this UI was figuring out an as natural way as possible to include a completely new and somewhat “foreign”, but essential feature towards Hoopooh’s continued growth.
Low-fidelity Ideation
Having settled on the features & user flow we wanted Hoopooh’s Marketplace to cover, we started with a ideation session to establish a starting point for our design through low-fi wireframes. Some of the ideas generated here were:
Mid fidelity
Final Product
The “My Listing” page let’s users keep an overview of their items for sale. Expired/sold items appear at the bottom.
“My Favourites” is a page hosting any items that the user has favourited.
Buyers connect with Sellers via the feature’s chat function to coordinate logistics and payment for items.
User can access all of their active and archived chat through the “My Chats” screen.
Conclusions
Key learnings
This project won us Ironhack's "Most Creative Solution" award and our client was extremely pleased with our work. Looking back, this really was a great project to work on. Based off our research and market trends we believe that the marketplace feature would be an ideal way to monetise Hoopooh while still providing value to the parents using the app.
Having the freedom to create any feature that could help monetise Hoopooh’s app while at the same time balancing it out with stricter restraints on UI design was a challenging but very worthwhile experience. One of the main challenges with the UI design was figuring out how to introduce this new feature to the original application while maintaining current styling elements in a cohesive way. Largely leaving the core app untouched, the key change made to it’s UI is that we moved the settings button from the bottom navbar into the hamburger menu on the Home Screen and built from there. Often as a designer you ultimately have to work with or around somebody else's designs and expand on them.
One of the most interesting takeaways from the user research was the fact that our respondents unilaterally found price as the determining factor in their purchasing behaviour. Budget stores were mentioned by everyone when asked where they shopped for their child products - everyone is looking for a deal.
As for next steps in the feature’s development we could explore building on the feature to allow the daycares themselves to list items in their own “shops”. We also believe a wallet or credit system could be a good approach to monetising user-to-user transactions and that the app would benefit from an advanced filtering system.