ThredUP aims to inspire a new generation to think secondhand first and provide a sustainable fashion future by modernizing thrifting. With the implementation of group ordering, thredUP hopes to grow their user base by making online secondhand shopping a social experience.
Our primary purpose for this project was to find and implement ways to create online secondhand shopping a social experience. As a group, we noticed that online secondhand shopping lacks the social gratification that in-person shopping has. To keep us on the right track and guide us in the right direction, we created 3 main goals:
Before we started brainstorming, we wanted to get a better understanding of what aspects of social shopping can be directly implemented into our functionalities. We started by performing qualitative and quantitative research.
We looked at numerous literature reviews to have a more in-depth understanding of shopping holistically and gather valuable information about the features we wanted to brainstorm for making online shopping more sociable. From this we gathered 2 main insights:
We noticed that although shopping socially with others was a relatively new experience, other apps such as food delivery applications had functionalities designated for creating a social experience. We wanted to reflect on how other companies effectively used social aspects to incentivize their users to use these functionalities.
We did a competitive analysis on 6 companies: Doordash, Facebook Marketplace, Instagram Shop, UberEats, Snackpass and Dewu.
We needed fast and concise responses to understand what aspects of shopping college students preferred and how that affected their experience. Our target audience was college students so we did an outreach to college students of all ages and gender. We had 3 primary ideas we wanted to address:
Next, from our outreach sample, we wanted to further understand the preferences stated in our responses to the survey. This part of the research was primarily to get detailed information that we weren’t able to get during the surveys and allow individuals to have the ability to express their opinions. In total we conducted 12 interviews with 2 research objectives:
After gathering our research, we decided to organize our main key insights through the process of affinity mapping and user personas.
This method was used to categorize the qualitative information we gathered during our user research. We categorized each idea based on our focus points and had a clearer understanding on the similarities and key insights to refine our project scope.
How do we group our research findings so we can efficiently derive key insights?
Our team observed behavioral patterns from our user research data to ultimately group similar people together into different types of user personas. Not only would this help us create a greater understanding and empathize deeper with the target users, but it would also provide direction for making design decisions going forward.
The ideation phase was one of the most important phases we went through to put all our research into a design we wanted to formulate. We began by doing different ideation methods: Negative Brainstorming and Crazy 8’s
We first started by reframing our how might we statements for each of our user personas to come up with what would be the worst possible products for each persona. For example, for the indecisive one, our HMW statement was “HMW make Carissa feel confused or unsure about her purchases?”
A lot of our initial ideas were based on the ideas generated from the Negative Brainstorming activity. We considered gamification, gifting promotions, style boxes, a paired big-little system between the indecisive persona and the fashionista. We also considered an aesthetic feed and moodboards inspired by Pinterest and VSCO, both of which are popular amongst college students. Additionally, we also considered community engagement ideas through on-campus pop-up shops or also designing a community forum to ThredUP’s interface.
We first started by eliminating ideas that weren’t supported by our user research or were too similar to existing features on ThredUP’s site. Then, we proceeded to utilize two prioritization frameworks: the RICE Method and the Pugh Matrix.
RICE Method: This method was suggested by our client mentors, and seemed really promising as it took into consideration research, our personal opinions, as well as our time constraints. However, we ended up coming into a roadblock of figuring out how to exactly quantify the Reach score given we didn’t have access to statistics specifically with college student users. We additionally were unsure how to rate ideas that would only “increase user engagement” amongst existing users, but wouldn’t be enough to ultimately bring in completely new users. With these complications, we decided to search for different prioritization frameworks that better fit our needs.
Pugh Matrix: We landed upon the Pugh matrix. We loved its flexibility in terms of selecting our own criteria as well as creating our own weights and scales. For criteria, we chose social potential, time to implement, college student user base increase, increasing engagement, increasing satisfaction, can use existing infrastructure, ease of use, gamification potential, and user-generated content potential.
We scored each of our possible feature ideas, and with the highest possible score being 28, we decided to move forward with the features that received a score >14. As such, we selected group ordering, loyalty program targeted towards college students, collaborative collections, public profiles and style boxes/gifts.
However, when communicating these ideas to our design team back at ThredUp, we got direct feedback and had to revise our solutions:
Loyalty Program
With the client feedback, our ideas of group tasks leading to group points seemed overcomplicated. Our team felt that if we got rid of the competitive and collaboration angles, there wasn’t much benefit to updating the loyalty program.
Style Boxes
The use case of having someone feeling confident enough in their knowledge of their friend’s style in order to shop for them was too niche, and also may only seem marketable during holiday seasons. With this, we decided to shift our idea from shopping for others to shopping with others. This led to our concept of shared albums (final product coined “collaborated collections”).
After we selected our top 3 ideas by scoring with our Pugh Matrix, we decided to do Crazy 8’s again!
With our initial concepts of shared albums, group shopping, and public profiles, we began mapping out the user flows on FigJam. We took into consideration the various possible entry/exit points, user tasks, and user decisions.
Initially we created mid-fidelity wireframes suitable for the desktop feature for users for shared shopping cart and the wishlist feature. However, after more research and consideration with the design team at ThredUp, we realized that the mobile interfaces were more suitable for our audience group and social features we wanted to implement. As a result we converted our designs to be available on mobile while than desktop.
After we finished our prototype based on our wireframes, we wanted to test how users interact with our current design and have the opportunity to iterate again based on the feedback. We had 3 main ideas that we could categorize our feedback on: (1) Discoverability, (2) Usability, and (3) Satisfaction
Initially the landing experience to start the the shared shopping cart feature was confusing to users. It was originally underlined, however users were unable to tell that it was where they could click to start the experience. We got feedback that transforming it to a button would be more efficient.
Users didn't know that the "your group" section was clickable as it was a relatively new feature design that we implemented. The users were eventually able to figure it out during the experience but it was new so they didn't know it was something that could be clicked. Given the feeedback we got during usability tests, a goal as we go into high-fidelities is to make these options more readily available and easy for users to understand
We actually got a lot of positive feedback on our features. One user was not a social shopper but said that these features enlightened the experience. From these thoughts, we were able to highlight the features that had positive feedback and keep that in mind when improving our other designs.
From our final round of feedback, we were able to iterate through our prototypes and improve our designs. We ended with a total of 170 high-fidelity prototypes that represented our goal of creating a social experience for second-hand online shopping.
Through this project, I had a lot of opportunities to understand the importance of UX Research techniques such as minimizing bias during surveying and interviewing. One of the biggest challenges we faced when gathering research questions was how we can develop questions that brought insightful understanding about the topic at hand without asking leading questions that create bias in our answers. I think that through this experience we understood how concise and accurate we had to be to get the most precise insights about our project question.
We had to go through a lot of iterations to get to our final prototype. In between each design, even when we thought our design was perfect, when it was time to get feedback, we realized how much improvement was needed. In addition, there was so much other factors that took into play allowing us to realize that certain ideas we thought were suitable for our problem statement, just didn't work out. This learning experience helped me value this iterative process and really helped me gain positive impact through resilience and knowledge that we should always iterate, iterate and iterate. Although the iteration process took a lot of time, and there were a lot of ideas and processes we had to throw away and restart with, it was a demonstrative experience that taught me a lot about design and how much goes into each process. I cam out of this project valuing design and loving it even more.
Our main form of communication with our Product Managers back in ThredUp was through zoom and I learned so much about how to effectively communicate my design ideas to them. We went through many iterations of discussing ideas, and there was a time where there was a miscommunication for one of our ideas. We weren't able to clearly express our design process so our idea that we were passionate about was denied. However, after clearly communicating and expressing our passions for this solution again, we were able to show them why it was an innovative idea, and it ended up being one of our final designs: the collaborative collection.
Thank you to my amazing team who taught me so much about design and gave me this amazing opportunity to work on one of my passions. It was a wonderful experience and definitely something I will always look back on for inspiration :)
With my amazing group, I learned a lot about the iterative process and was grateful for the amazing experience to utilize my skills in design for one of my favorite hobbies, shopping. I want to thank my wonderful team and