Localu

‍

Introduction

Localu is a group project that I worked on for 4 weeks with Ana Roman and Daniela Ocklind during the UX/UI design boot camp at Barcelona Code School. The goal was to create an app that could promote local shopping and local business visibility within a city or neighborhood.  

‍

Problem Statement

Local retail business owners are finding themselves side-lined by competition, especially in the e-commerce landscape as they do not have the necessary resources to dissuade globalization ideologies. This in turn has a negative impact on local communities, robbing them of their social cohesion in their local area.

‍

Problem Objectives

Create an e-commerce app that is easy to use and promotes local vendor collaboration which in turn, can help stimulate sustainable, local socio-economy incentives and increase local online retail visibility.

‍

Long-term Goals

For local business owners to easily establish their brand/product online and for customers to get any product locally sourced - straight away.

‍

Discovery

To initiate the research and frame our project objectives we began with group brainstorm where we discussed what we would like to know about the problem:

- What are the top things people buy online?

- How do we get local business owners to invest in e-commerce?

- What are the main barriers that local businesses have with setting up an e-commerce?

- Would getting into e-commerce mean a drastic change/effort for a local business store?

‍

DESK RESEARCH:

- Collaboration is particularly important to the retail sector through cross-referrals. (Molenaar , C., 2013)

- Customers are beginning to see no real added value to visiting shops they think 'I know more about it than the sales staff anyway' and are increasingly inclined to buy on the internet. (Singh, A., 2019)

- Perceived ease-of-use is the degree in which an individual believes that a particular system is free to use, and no expertise requires adoption. (Kumar, A., & Ayedee, N., 2021)

‍

Survey Forms

We created a survey form that was sent out to a sample of 16 local business owners in Barcelona in order to gather some quantitative data to better guide our case study.

Interviews

We proceeded to carry out a large number of semi-structured interviews with local business owners in Barrio Gótico, Barcelona area which provided us a wealth of raw qualitative data.

Main points:

- Most local businesses used social media as a way of advertising their products and increase visibility.

- Local retailers made use of a large e-commerce platform or have an official website to showcase and sell their products online.

- Many voiced concerns over the expensive delivery cost on e-commerce platforms which was sometimes higher than the product cost for business owners.

- There was a wide consensus that e-commerce is leading the change in shopping attitudes.

- Most of them also still believed that their customer base primarily came from traditional word-of-mouth.

- Talks of collaboration between local businesses, received mix of responses; some did not see how it could work, others speculated on the idea of providing discount through store referrals.

- Most interviewees showed an interest in having a local e-commerce app.

‍

Top features that interviewees would like to see in the app

Easy to use/Didactic

High store and product visibility

Regular updates and promotion

Synchronization between stock and online products

Reliable and cheap delivery service

‍

Define

Based on our research findings in the discovery phase, the team decided to design an e-commerce app for local retail business owners with the following characteristics:

- The app aims to be an e-commerce app that promotes local shopping and local business visibility within their city or neighborhood

- The app's design aims to be 'user friendly', in particular for users who are not considered to be tech-savy.

- The app will feature a 'community' section where users can post collaboration requests with other local business owners.

‍

USER PERSONA

Ideate

Having established the main functions of our app we proceeded to building our site map which we also tested through a card sorting session with four external individuals at the school.

‍

Task Flows

We decided to make a prototype with 3 different task flows.
The reason for this is that we wanted to test the core functions of the app for the user;

- Handle a new order for an online clients

- Manage the online store and preview product.

- Connect and collaborate with another local business owner.

Style Guide

Each team member created a mood board and style guide for the Localu app. We then went out in the streets of Barcelona to do a guerilla A/B testing to see which one the general public preferred. Once the results were in we put the color palette and typography together along with the logo to create the finalized style guide for the Localu app.

‍

Prototype

‍

‍

Testing

Once the prototype was stitched up and finalized we went back to some of the local business owners we had previously interviewed, this time for them to test the app. We delegated one task flow at a time, observing and taking notes on our test subject's behavioral and attitudinal responses.

‍

Results

Negative Feedback:

- Icons on the bottom of the navigation bar were difficult to understand

- The task success rate was average, with many having difficulty completing them due to some copy miscommunication

Positive Feedback:

- The app was said to feel useful

- Clear layout and good visuals

- Large buttons, easy to spot.

‍

Design Sprint Summary

Our mission was to create an e-commerce app that could be used by retailers in their local community by making it easy-to-use as well as introducing features of collaboration and cross-referrals between business owners.

While the 'community' feature on the app was met with mixed responses, we believe that due to the novelty behind this new e-commerce aspect it is bound to be met with some resistance as to our knowledge this hasn't been done before, therefore would require further investigation and ideation in the next design sprint.

‍

‍