Secondary Research

The questions that the secondary research tried to answer were:

• Do bargain prices motivate shoppers to make purchases, and why?

• Does bargain/on-sale shopping behavior differ in mobile versus brick-and-mortar shopping?

• Does bargain/on-sale shopping motivate women and men the same?

• What are the price monitoring app products that are currently available?

Many researchers indicate that consumers love bargain shopping and that it can motivate consumers to make a purchase. What I found interesting is that, at face value, the motivation behind discount shopping is to save money, but the thrill of bargain shopping is the source of shoppers’ satisfaction. Bargain shoppers see commerce as a competition, and they want to win the prize. When they are victorious, they feel in control and confident. The bargaining or value motivation may also have more of an effect on mobile browsing than in-person browsing.

When it comes to bargain shopping for clothing online:

• Women are more likely than men to respond to bargains (46%, compared to 14% of males).

• Buying on sale is more crucial to women (74% compared with 57% of men). 

• Women tend to care more about applying coupons or promo codes than men (34% of women and 26% of men).

As far as the existence of other products in the market, many apps for saving money are available. Some are for specific businesses, some aggregate coupons from online and brick-and-mortar stores in one app, some provide discounts on luxury brands (like The RealReal), and some track pricing and notify their users. Most store websites also have a "Wish List" tab on their sites.

With that secondary research finding in hand, I decided to target women between the age of 25 and 45 living in Columbus, Ohio.

Competition - Heuristic Analysis

Did heuristic analysis regarding aesthetic and minimalist design, consistency and standards, and user control and freedom for three apps, through which I learned what works and does not work about those apps.

User Interviews

Interviewed 6 participants after doing survey screening. Their inputs were valuable and helped me with the direction of the product. Some of the suggestions and comments were:

• A filter for trendiness

• Having sale items from her favorite stores saved under a tab, since she does not usually have a specific item in mind when she bargain shops

• Capability to add a plugin to get extra discounts

• Giving a tool the price range in which she is looking and receiving notifications when the price gets into that range

• All participants didn’t like apps that ask too many questions or have much advertising—those apps didn’t feel secure

• They also like modern and clean-looking apps

I took their comments further and put them into 9 clusters to synthesize their answer through the Affinity mapping tool.

As a result of the primary research, Jessica, a persona representing the typical customer for the Price Tracking Fashion app, her complete profile and empathy map, were created.

The research led me to create an app for smartphones and, more specifically, iPhone

Information Architecture of the App

It was an eye-opening process. I had some ideas of how the red route for the app should work, but when I was creating the Site Map and the User Flow, I noticed that in practice and from the users' standpoint, steps might not flow in the order that I had assumed.

Sketch & Guerilla Usability Testings

The Site Map & User Flow led to the first sketch of the design and I uploaded it into Marvel to start Guerilla usability testing

Moodboard & Style Guides

The wireframing went through many iterations, and finally, it was time to add UI elements to the project. I went back to my interviewees’ input and tried to design a modern and professional look for the app.

The Style Guides have changed and improved from the first version of it and it can be seen at Style Guide 

Prototype

I prototyped the first version of the design and went through a usability test with five new participants. The issues that came out were:

Issue #1: Having “Sign up” instead of the “Continue” button on the Splash page.

Recommendation: Changing the “Continue” button to the “Sign up” button.

Issue #2: Confusion between the Exit and Continue buttons on the Login page.

Recommendation: Getting rid of the Exit button on the Login page.

Issue #3: Being able to stay on the search result page after adding an item to track, instead of landing on the My items page and starting the search over, to explore the search results and add more items.

Recommendations: Thinking of changing the color of the heart to blue every time the user adds something to track. And teaching users in the video tutorial that if they want to see their items, they need to go to the Home icon, aka the My Items page.

Issue #4: “Name” should be “First Name” on the Registration page.

Recommendation: Changing “Name” to “First Name.”

Issue #5: Making the Splash page more exciting.

Recommendation: Trying different typefaces and seeing which one can work to add excitement while remaining consistent with the brand.

Issue #6: Too much white space on the login page.

Recommendation: Adding more color in the background.

After incorporating the recommendations in the second version of the prototype, five new participants were interviewed and 3 recommendations were made.

Issue #1: Login Option on the splash page.

Recommendation: Moving the login link for users who already registered to the Splash page.

Issue #2: Being able to see more or fewer products in each row on the page.

Recommendation: Adding a View icon and letting users have that option.

Issue #3: Seeing more information about a product.

Recommendation: Adding the ability to open the product on a separate page and see more details.

Final Prototype

The final version of the design for the red route of the app after 3 iterations. The interactive prototype can be seen at: Final prototype

Conclusion

I have learned and practiced many design and UX principles through this project. I gained an understanding of the core stages of design thinking: Empathize, Define, Ideate, Prototype, and Test. I worked through various brainstorming resources and activities that generated or improved my idea for my capstone project. I practiced a variety of UX-based research methods and learned how to determine which method will be most useful to me as I worked through each stage of the design process. I did competitive research and conducted a heuristic analysis, which identified opportunities for innovation. I developed a research plan and applied best practices for recruiting users, writing screeners, and conducting interviews. I synthesized research results through affinity maps, empathy maps, personas, problem statements, which kept my designs focused on the users.

I created sitemaps, user flows, and card sorts, and learned how to create a clickable prototype and wrote tasks for a usability test and reflected the inputs to my prototype. I wish I had more time to go beyond developing red route and creating all the pages for this project.