Resell & Reuse
Overview
The Idea: An app where you can order used clothing which you can then pick up in a kiosk!
Approach: Lean UX is a design methodology that builds a shared understanding of the user by prioritizing continuous learning.
Role: Team Lead
Duration: 3 months
Team Size: 4 members
Challenges: Pivots through the process, Task management
Tools: Figma, FigJam
Meet the Team
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Keya Mehta
Team Lead
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Jalen Battle
Team Member
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Natalia Navaroli
Team Member
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Anneli Nurmi
Team Member
INTRODUCTION
Near the beginning of the school semester at the end of summer, my mom and I decided to go school shopping. I basically wanted an entire new wardrobe, because everything that I owned, already wasn’t trendy anymore. After spending the whole day at the mall however, and having no luck with finding something that was affordable and high quality, I defeatedly went home and decided maybe shopping just wasn’t for me because I was too picky.
During the first week of my Interaction Design 2 class at Kennesaw State University, when we were told we would need to find a problem space that we could pitch that could potentially turn into a prototype, I already had something perfect in mind.
Over the course of the class, through using Lean UX, my team and I came up with the idea of R&R, which stands for Resell and Reuse. The concept of the prototype is an online thrift store, where users can buy thrifted clothes online. Users can then pick up their items of clothing from a kiosk. Users can also directly buy items of clothing from the kiosk.
Lean UX is a combination of UX, Agile, and Scrum. Lean UX focuses on the user and how they used the actual product. Using the Scrum framework was the way that the team and I stayed punctual and on the same page about the project through meetings. Lastly, Agile is the methodology that organizes the project by dividing the work needed to be done into phases. For the team and I, because we were working on a school based schedule, we had a limited amount of time and completed this project over 7 weeks. Two three-week sprints, and one refinement week. A sprint is how we divided our time to reach the goals we made with a reflective meeting at the ending to prepare us for the next sprint. For us, our goal for each sprint was to have created a MVP (minimum viable product) to get feedback on.
The rest of the page is split up the same way we worked on this project. 2 sections, 1 for each sprint, further divided into each week that we worked towards our goals.
Sprint 1
The Lean UX canvas, created by Gothelf and Seiden, helped us structure how we would go about making hypotheses to test in the future.
The first step in the Lean UX canvas was to write our problem statement into more concise terms for us to look back upon. The problem statement also helped us understand what is currently on the market that tries to solve our problem statement and what specific area of the market we are in. In the textbook Lean UX: Designing Great Products with Agile Teams, Gothelf and Seiden say that the “Business problem statements reframe the work in a way that explicitly demands that product discovery work take place.“ (Ch.5)
In week 0, our team and I focused on nailing down what we wanted to do with our problem space. Essentially, we had a rough idea of what our issue was, but we weren’t sure what to do with it. This is where the Lean UX canvas became a huge help to us.
Week 0
Our problem statement was, “The current state of fashion retail has focused primarily on cheap clothing that doesn’t last long made with unethical labor from a limited singular brand. Our product/service will address this gap by curating clothing that are sustainable, affordable and ethically sourced.Our initial focus will be anyone who is interested in ethical clothing but is on a budget. We'll know we are successful when we see more thrifted and sustainable clothing is bought.”
The second step on the Lean UX canvas was to decide what business outcomes meant that our product would be successful. This meant considering what people would be doing differently if our problem space did get solved.
The third step on the Lean UX canvas was to decide who our proto-personas would be. Proto-personas are personas based off assumptions, with no research to back our assumptions up. We initially had two proto-personas, a persona from the buyer side, and a persona from the seller side. This was to help the team and start imagining what our user’s wants, needs, and obstacles could be.
Now that we created our proto-personas, we moved on to the fourth step in the Lean UX canvas. This step basically involves figuring out what our user’s motivations might be in using this app. We identified specific reasons as to why our users would want to use our product to accomplish their goals.
Once we figured out why our users would want to use this product, we started brainstorming ideas of what the solution product could be. The team and I did this by drawing out different solutions and talking through each drawing and seeing what everyone resonated with or finding patterns between the solutions.
Now that we had each working part of our hypothesis together, we decided to start making our hypothesis! We then put these hypotheses in a product backlog, which helps us focus on the features in our hypothesis that we could work on. To help organize our product backlog, we decided to graph our hypotheses by risk over value. This helped us realize what was the most valuable to test first, which was the highest risk with the highest value. We then reordered our product backlog to go from highest risk/highest value, to highest risk/lowest value.
The last step in the Lean UX canvas was to actually figure out what our MVPs would be to test our hypothesis. In the textbook, Lean UX: Designing Great Products with Agile Teams, Gothelf and Seiden explain, “What’s the least amount of work we need to do to learn the next most important thing?The answer to this question is the experiment you’re going to run to test your hypothesis.” (Ch.8) They explain that MVps are our way to learn to most with the least amount of effort wasted.
In week 1, the team and I first started off by doing a two day standup. Two day standup consist of brief organizational meetings that take place every two days in the week. In these meetings we would go over what tasks we needed to complete, what tasks need to be completed as well as distribution of work. These meetings helped us monitor our work pace as well as pivot accordingly.
For our first week testing assumptions, we decided to test our highest priority hypothesis which was “We will achieve continuous user engagement if this user Jesse, can achieve niche selections with a notification system to see what your favorite sellers have uploaded.”
To test this hypothesis, we decided to have a scavenger hunt with participants across Marietta campus. We added the participants to a discord group chat, and sent out “notifications” every so often with the location of goody bags we had placed previously.
After we had completed these tests we had interviews with the participants to ask them about their experience participating in the scavenger hunt. We asked questions surrounding their shopping and lifestyle habits. During the interviews, everyone took turns facilitating and moderating. We all also took notes.
Week 1
After the interviews, we had team meetings where we affinity mapped all the information we collected from our participants. Affinity mapping consists of finding patterns between our individual interview notes.
From our first test in week 1, we were able to learn that this kind of business model could actually be feasible. People were willing to go out of their way to claim something, even if it was more convenient for it to be delivered, for sustainability or affordability.
We also learned:
Participants found it easier to find the goody bag when a map and description were provided
Participants felt a sense of competitiveness knowing other people could grab the goody bags as they didn’t know how many goody bags there were and if they would be able to get one.
Many participants didn’t mind looking awkward searching for the goody bag
In sprint 1 week 2, the team and I decided to continue our research on our hypothesis and make a prototype for our MVP. This week we conducted a usability test and had participants go through the process of placing an actual order on an item of clothing. The notes from our research we had taken in week 1 gave us insight in how we should frame the idea of the app through the design. After our usability tests were complete, we again affinity mapped our notes that we had taken. During this week we still made sure to do our two day standups.
Lastly, at the end of the week, we had a retrospective meeting. In this meeting we went over what went well in the sprint, what didn’t go so well, and what we wanted to change for our next sprint. Our biggest challenge was being more specific in our two day standups with what exactly needed to be done. Our action to solve this was having better communication and task expectations.
Week 2
Sprint 2
Week 0
In Sprint two, the team and I had a very similar approach as sprint 1, but with the intention of having a fully fledged hi fidelity prototype by the end. We first decided to go ahead and look over everything we had done in Sprint 1 Week 0 to see if there was anything that we needed to change.
There were a few very important changes that we made during this week
We realized that because our prototype consisted of three different interfaces, one from the seller’s perspective, one from the buyer’s perspective and that of our kiosk, we didn’t have the time required to create a hi fidelity version of these three interfaces. To minimize our workload, we removed the interface from the seller’s prespective.
We decided to scrap the second persona we had, the seller persona. This is because of limitations mentioned earlier. We also removed some of the details we had included in our buyer persona that now didn’t match what we had previously assumed. We also changed some of the obstacles that our buyer persona Alex had with some of the obstacles we learned about from our previous research.
Lastly, we changed our product backlog, because we finished testing the hypothesis we had in the product backlog the couple weeks earlier. We added in the new hypothesis to test for our next couple weeks in its place.
Week 1
In sprint 2 week 1 we wanted to get feedback on our kiosk and the clothing ordering process, as these two aspects of the prototype were completely untested in our previous usability test. We decided to have participants pretend to order an item of clothing, then walk to another destination where they would interact with the kiosk and pick up their item.
We did this by having the participant interact with the mobile prototype, then walking them to a group member who was 5 minutes away by walking distance who was holding an ipad with the “kiosk” for the participant to interact with. While the participant was walking to the “kiosk” we asked them questions on their shopping preferences as well as demographic questions. We also asked them to give us their thoughts as they interacted with the prototypes. We audio recorded the entire usability test for each participant. We used these audio recordings to write our notes to affinity map later.
From this week’s usability test, we got a lot of feedback on the visual elements on our prototype as we had the main concept locked down from our previous sprint.
One of the biggest things we learned from the usability test was that we needed to add something to incentivize users to click on the bag after adding an item of clothing to the bag.
During week 2, we continued working on our prototype. We got a lot of great feedback from our previous week so we focused on adding those changes to our prototype and then usability testing them. During this time, we were still debating on visual elements such as color and backgrounds, which we asked our participants about in our usability tests. We got a lot of feedback on this from our participants.
During this week, we also updated our proto-personas by making slight changes to the age range, as well as adding more goals for our persona, based on our affinity mapping. For example, we added that our persona cares more about the quality of the clothes that they have, rather than the quantity.
Week 2
At the end of the week we again had a retrospective meeting to again talk about what went well, what didn't go so well, and what were some things we could do differently while we finished off minor edits we needed to make in the prototype.
Conclusion
In conclusion, the experience of creating the prototype was a hectic but exciting one. Practicing Lean UX in general, but especially for the first time felt fast paced. This was good and bad, as we were getting a lot done in a short period of time, and being our most efficient, however, it definitely didn’t give us the time to flesh out each aspect of the prototype that I think the prototype in general could have benefited from, i.e. dropping the buyer perspective of the app.
We all proved ourselves however with making sure we got all our tasks done efficiently and always remaining punctual and hard working till the very end.
If I had the chance to change anything in the prototype now it would be to:
Have a plus one on the bag at all times after the user adds the item to cart. Due to time limitations and limitations on igma this just wasn’t possible without a lot of brute force.
The sizing of the kiosk, during the beginning of the semester was just chosen based off of a team mate’s laptop we could have used for the usability tests, which worked great for the tests, but a more standard convention for kiosks are ipads, so I wish we would have used a iPad size dimensions instead.