The Official Black App
Leveraging Community
The client wanted to redesign the end to end user experience of their mobile application.
Through research we wanted to learn about the client's business goals, what their needs are, and what they are hoping to get out from this project. We also wanted to create a new user persona so we could have a better understanding what their needs, goals and pain points are. Also, run competitive and comparative analysis to get ideas of how the overall redesign will look and what new features we might unlock.
The core values of the business are that it is community driven, small business focus, and minority owned businesses. These were kept top of our mind during our design process to preserve the core values of the app.
The client wanted a current evaluation of their app to find out what the problem and the struggles are when using the app.
As a head of research, I led the team on a heuristics evaluation and found that there were many things that had to be fixed like wordings weren't consistent, UI acted weird, it wasn't user friendly and even a simple home button was misleading.
Our team created a lofi-prototype version of the current app to test our assumptions from the heuristics evaluation.
Some of the findings from usability test results were
Our user research objective was to gain understanding about who the users are, what their needs and frustrations are about supporting minority-owned small local businesses.
We sent out a survey to collect target users and gathered 4 participants who were both a business owner and local business supporter. We performed a 1-on-1 user interview with an observer. Then, we got those data and quotes and categorized them into two affinity maps to see recurring patterns in themes. With that, we were able to synthesize the themes of two user types, and came up with some important insights for each.
Business owner
Consumer
The original user persona that the client provided did not just have enough to support the redesign, so from our user research, we made a separate two user personas.
"Small local business owners need a platform that provides value to their business so they can easily promote their products and services to customers."
"Small business enthusiasts don't know where to look but need a way to find quality products from local small businesses so they can support their community."
Some of the things that we found that we wanted to possibly implement
On our first kickoff meeting with the client, he agreed to send us the important data of the app for us. We had constantly requested the client for user data, analytics from current app and their research data to further research the app. We had sent out several emails, texted his private number, and contacted his coworker. However, we never heard back from the client and it slowed down our process.
We have also shortened The Official Black App to 'OBA' for the logo and for easier pronouncing of the whole name of the app.
When it came to the map users were really drawn to click on the location pin they saw on the map and when that didn’t work they would click around trying anything to see if it would work. Because of this we ended up having an 80% misclick rate and only 20% of our testers moved on to the next screen
With our Blog/Forum icon users didn’t understand what that icon was for so we ended up with a 100% misclick rate but we found on our second tasks that also involved the icon there was a 100% success rate which led us to believe that once people understood what the icon was for it became very intuitive
Lastly there were some comments that we received back about how people would like for there to be a search bar within the blog/forum feature so they could search for specific posts
With this in mind we went on to iterate on our designs and create our design guide.
Below is a consumer side prototype
Below is a business owner side prototype
Based off of the previous usability test results, we made the pin on the map interactive which made the success rate higher. We still had 14% misclick rate but we think that could be dealt with a bigger sized pin.
The forum/blog button was easily understood once the users fully understood what the button represented. 1st Task showed 33% misclick rate while the 2nd Task showed 0% mislick rate. This showed the function had a learning curve. Also we think this can be fixed with the onboarding process.
Lastly, search bar was also added to the forum/blog based off users’ recommendations.
App walkthrough - once our users learned through testing what the icons were, they were able to find them quickly, so it would be beneficial to give them an understanding of what each function does through an education component- which was proven in our research to be effective.
Option to list a business - in this iteration we focused on consumer side, moving forward will focus on business owner side and expanding current user flow for listing a business to more intuitive for business owners as well as consumers.
Implement an in-app shopping experience - directly within app versus redirecting to outside site.
Card Sort- the app initially had 32 categories which were far too niche to have businesses intuitively organized between the categories. The goal of the card sort is to implement a more effective way for business to get their name out there and consumer easier to find.
Although the client did not communicate with us, our design team persevered with enthusiasm and dedication to produce the best possible outcome for the project. This experience highlights the advantages of adaptability and prioritizing the user's needs. Despite facing obstacles, we leveraged our creative freedom to modify the UI with fewer restrictions, which helped us gain confidence in making design decisions and successfully finishing this project.
