Fashion & Lifestyle Commerce
Role
— UX Designer
Year
— 2017
Status
— Complete
Superbalist is a leading South African e-commerce business, focussed on providing a wide array fashion and lifestyle products to its dedicated user base. At Superbalist, I worked on multiple projects within the Product Team, which consisted of myself, a UI Designer and the Product Manager. I worked on the mobile site, desktop site and both applications (Android and iOS).
Usability Testing
During the long-term sprint to redesign the Android App, I consulted with the UI designer on many features and changes to the app’s navigation and usability, particularly within the Search, Sort And Filter features. There were redundancies that I suggested we remove and I wanted to ensure that combined filters always resulted in sound logic. The UI designer created the new screen designs using Sketch. We needed to test how existing users would interact with the new designs.
I first catalogued the key changes and wrote User Journeys concerning these features. I then turned these User Journeys into a consolidated narrative for a task-based User Test. The context for this test was for users to try to buy their friend a birthday present. The narrative of this test pushed users to ideally interact with the sorting, filtering and searching functionalities, by creating restraints or herding them towards the feature. Using Abstract and Invision, I pulled relevant screens from Sketch and added the necessary edits to the screens with assistance from the UI designer. I then linked the screens into a working mobile prototype following the test narrative. I finally wrote up the documentation for the participation consent forms, the User Test task list and a post test questionnaire.
We recruited participants in an agile manner from the customer service team in our building. The rationale behind this was that (like our existing user base), the team has standard experience using the app without an understanding of the app from a developer’s perspective. I ran the testing process – making sure not to lead users to an answer or heavily influence their actions. The largely positive results and feedback indicated that the new designs were still usable but also showed that users have a strong predisposition to use the Search function rather than relying heavily on Filtering and Sorting, unless Price was a concern. This was a successful agile approach to get largely unbiased feedback on new features.
User Flow Mapping
A project I undertook was to document the User Flows of the entire Android application. I grouped each set of flows together, while showing where they interact with each other and how they are connected to the core navigation. I created nodes (indicated in the key) to show where decisions are being made within the app, as opposed to a user progressing linearly from screen to screen. The User Flows diagram was interactive and linked.
Once the Android Flows were created, I did the same for the Desktop site. Since screenshots were not viable for this project, I began by creating representative mockups for each style of page on the website. In addition to the Flow key, the mockups were designed with recurring styles/colours to indicate certain pages (the key for this is included on the top left).