Building a sense of community for second-hand vintage shoppers
Shopping Experience - Redesign
Known Source
UX Case Study
Context
Known Source is an online shopping platform addressing the issue of excess in fashion by offering a marketplace where users can browse and purchase clothes from trusted second-hand "Dealers." Customers buy with confidence from an established community of sellers, who are charged a commission per transaction. Additionally, customers have the option to return their clothing to Known Source at any time, with the platform handling the resale of these items. Known Source aims to create a collaborative ecosystem for second-hand specialists, dealers, and fashion enthusiasts.
At the time of this project, Known Source was in Beta mode and had identified several issues through their own user testing. They approached us to address these issues and refine the platform before its full launch.
Team and Roles
Lauren Chen
Hima Bijulal
Sui Li Chan
Team Lead
UX Designer
UX Designer
Research
User Interviews and Affinity Mapping
We started the project by conducting user interviews and used the findings to conduct a session of affinity mapping. Affinity maps were done for three pages on the platform.
Along with this exercise, we conducted a heuristic analysis of the current version of the platform on both mobile and desktop versions. You can find our Heuristic Analysis [here]. During this analysis, we also evaluated the accessibility of both versions and documented any shortcomings. From these exercises, we identified key problem areas and developed our problem statements to guide the improvements needed.
Survey
We then curated a survey of 20 questions which were used to better understand our potential customer base and their expectations/challenges from platforms similar to known Source. The survey can be found here. We were able to get 47 responses to our survey questions. The results are as follows:
Persona
Feature Prioritization
User Flow
Lofi - V1 / Sketches
These sketches represent our ideation and brainstorming phase and can be found here.
User Testing
Our User testing notes can be found here. These are notes for V1 and based on this some issues were addressed in V2.
Some Highlights were as follows:
Needs more indication of credibility of the dealers.
Two different return policies were looking very suspicious. Define them better and make the difference explicit
The placement of the price of the item is not intuitive. "Why is it at the bottom?"
The blue tag saying "Buy Fast" does not convey that there is only one left. Instead it feels like someone is telling her what to do.
Version 1, the information which was not available should not have empty placeholders on the page. Just remove sections if there is no info to fill in.
Blue Tag and Red Tag works
"Why is there no "Share" button?"
Are the star ratings for the product or the dealer. Do second hand items need a rating system?