OPPORTUNITY STATEMENT

CHARITY BAY - Uplifting CharityBay’s mobile app to provide users with a more intuitive and rewarding experience. CharityBay’s purpose is to digitalise the charity sector, and create a seamless marketplace connecting buyers & donors of second-hand goods.

Role: UX Designer, User research & synthesis, customer journey mapping, user flows, wireframing and prototyping.

Time frame: 2 months

Why?

CharityBay is the modern way of op shopping - focusing on a fresher, multi faceted approach to a traditionally tedious process of donating and buying second-hand goods from op shops. On one hand, CharityBay gives buyers the rewarding opportunity to find something at a reasonable price, while knowing all proceeds go to charity. On the other hand, it allows donors the opportunity to offload their second hand goods for a good cause.

To compliment their existing website, CharityBay has an app which allows for users to buy and donate on their mobile phones as well. However, users coming onto the app aren’t always clear on CharityBay’s proposition, and the function of the app.

There is a disconnect between how buyers & donors understand the CharityBay proposition and mobile interface

How?

This project was done over 6 weeks, with regular check-ins with CharityBay. We presented to the clients on Week 3 and week 6, working in an agile environment that allowed us to quickly adapt to their feedback, whether it was on presentation or over slack.

We followed the Double Diamond method of design thinking, a series of divergent and convergent thought patterns allow us to empathise with the user and use design to Solve the problem.

Research

A number of different research methods were employed to better understand the user and to validate our problem statement

  • 1:1 interviews

  • Heuristic evaluations

This was put into an affinity map to determine if any patterns or trends would emerge.

App entry
Entry/Onboarding was easy to understand and follow

Education
Social impact purpose of app hard to access and understand

Reserve price
Lack of clarity on purpose and functionality of Reserve Price

Navigation
Navigation is not always intuitive and vibrations when going through app feels arbitrary

Define: What’s the problelm?

We further empathised with the user by creating a Customer Journey, focusing on their activities, pain points and thoughts as they go through the stages from Awareness through to Advocacy

Develop: How might we?

We asked ourselves How Might We create an intuitive buyer’s experience so that users can purchase products and understand the respective social impact?

The ideation process involved

  • Crazy 8 sketches (a number of quick, timeboxed sketches)

  • Miro board brainstorming

  • Lo-Fi wireframes

  • Discussions with the team and clients

Building the prototype

From initial ideation, the lo-fi wireframes were chosen by considering what the user wants, how they want to approach it, and why this can benefit both the user and the company.

Some areas we took into consideration were

  • Improving navigation

  • Simplifying pages before end goal

  • Unifying typography, text sizes and image sizes

  • Gamifying the bidding experience by showing the top bidder

  • Creating a sense of urgency by showing the time

  • Congratulating the user for winning the bid

We continued to seek feedback from CharityBay to ensure this aligned with company brand and purpose as we went into our hi-fi wireframes

Deliver: Design, test, design

Before we can ship the design, we first needed to validate some of the design with our users. So we conducted a number of Usability Tests to see if there were any areas where changes were needed.

The Usability Testing was measured with a series of SUS(System Usability Scale). From the 10 item questionnaire to determine the usability, we received a result of 75. We then made some improvements to the final design based on this feedback.

REFLECTION - Throughout this sprint, we encountered a number of challenges first in time constraints, access to user research, and also in changing client goals.

The benefit of working in an agile environment means that we were able to keep the clients involved throughout the process, and deliver a product that CharityBay was able to take to their dev teams. However, working in such an environment can come with its challenges, and it taught me that we have to continue to move and iterate.

I’m thankful to have been given the opportunity to uplift CharityBay’s mobile app and look forward to seeing how the platform will continue to grow.