Making to sell, sell to show

Bringing sellers to Bodego to show and sell their troves of treasure

Duration: 3 week sprint
Team Members: Raquel and Justin
Role: UX Research, Prototyping and Design
Methods Applied: Usability Testing, Competitive Analysis, Wireframing, Usability Heuristics
Programs Used: Figma

Me and two other team members got to work with actual clients that care about representing underserved populations and promoting their culture in an e-commerce platform. It all began when we met with Eliyana of Eliment Labs and shared our team an idea of launching an e-commerce onboarding platform for people of BIPOC (Black, Indigenous, People-of-Color) to advertise their business and sell their products. Eliyana wanted the e-commerce platform to be easy for users who are not as tech-savvy as many online users are able to launch their business online and therefore showcase their products and culture to the digital world. After they told us they were doing this to promote inclusivity and bringing small, independently-owned businesses of people of color to the forefront, we wanted to be onboard for this.

PERSONA DEFINED

EXPERIMENTING TO BRING OUT THE GOOD AND BAD

My team and I looked at other e-commerce marketplace stores like Etsy and Shopify and tried their onboarding platform. We noticed some pain points while we did a heuristic analysis on these stores to see if its onboarding process would either draw in or push away its users: 

• Their onboarding process was too long with many text fields to fill out

• They ask for personal information too soon in the process

• “The whole experience felt like applying for a Driver’s License in the DMV” as one user said  

We discussed with Eliyana as to how my team and I will create an onboarding platform suitable for small independent business owners to use. I created some survey questions aimed at people wanting to start or have an online business and sent them out to small business-owners.

The survey asked them questions what they want to see when they opted to signing up on an e-commerce site to sell their products. The results from these surveys are the following:

Ultimately, many users want an onboarding platform that provided the following:
1.) Simplicity
2.) To be informed and guided
3.) To be in control

COMPETITIVE ANALYSIS

In order for our onboarding to work for our users, we looked at other onboarding sites that worked to their advantage of attracting and keeping subscribers:  

• AirBnB had useful tips for users to go through the signup process.

• Zebra lets the users know any mistakes and successes when going through the onboarding process. They have a progress indicator that lets the user know how much is finished and how much is left to complete in the onboarding site. 

Eliyana noticed that we were very flexible and can adapt to sudden changes of her business proposal. Originally we were creating an onboarding platform that would work for small independent restaurants but now Eliyana wants us to shift our focus on small independent businesses. She even came up the name of our onboarding platform called “Bodego”.

We created three prototypes on Figma and used all three to test the following: 

• analyze how interested our site is to business owners 

• how to subscribe and be updated on any news related to Bodego

• how to set up their own store 

Of all the three prototypes we did, many of our users chose the prototype that had them set up their own store. Their choice was justified by these comments:

LOOKING BACK AND LOOKING AHEAD

Having the opportunity to work with real actual clients like Eliment Labs instilled me and my teammates a sense of accomplishment where we were involved to bring Eliment Labs’s concept of bridging small independent business owners of color with an onboarding ecommerce platform. 

The fact that Eliyana shared her ambition of assisting these business owners of color with getting onboard the e-commerce movement made us feel as though we are helping them promote their culture through its handmade gifts.

Eliyana spoke to me, Raquel, and Justin on behalf of Eliment Labs and applauded us how we were flexible with any changes and shifts during this project as it is all part of working with a client and a UX project.  

The fact that we regularly updated Eliyana the progress of our onboarding platform that can help minorities with dreams to sell their items and promote their culture really shows the diligence, commitment, and pride we all exemplified doing this project. We do hope to continually work with Eliment Labs for any of their UX and digital marketing needs in the future.