Project Overview
Many online shoppers spend hours, sometimes days looking for the product to fulfill their expectations and goals.
Having feedback on a product or service before making a purchase is important to consumers, but a lot of people find it difficult to trust online reviews.
TrustView is the Amazon’s plugin app that allows users to have a more efficient, trustworthy and interacting online shopping experience.
Role
User Research, UX Design
Project Type
Conceptual
My Contributions
As a solo designer for this project I was responsible for conducting user research, design, prototyping and usability testing.
Project Timeline
5 months
Problem Space
Most people find it challenging to trust online reviews.
Shoppers are often manipulated by falsified reviews, both positive and negative.
Online shoppers have to spend more time looking through different sources to get more information about the product.
Solution
I designed an Amazon’s plugin app called TrustView. It is meant to help people eliminate unwanted options in product and review sections, increasing faster checkout and motivating people to participate in exchanging their feedback about the product with others.
User Goals
To have confidence with the information provided by online reviews
To have an efficient and secure online shopping experience
To be able to write online reviews without limitations and be rewarded for their time and effort
Research
I gathered some information for my secondary research from online sources. The goal was to get more data about the existing problem through the analysis and statistics that have been previously conducted by other researchers.
The portal of statistics – Statista provided information, showing that in the past year Amazon was a leader in the online shopping industry. I narrowed down my research and decided to focus on Amazon since so many people use it and trust it already.
Survey
It was important to validate and compare information I collected from online sources with the people I could question myself. I conducted a survey with 23 participants and their answers brought some new information for my studies.
Interviews
In order to get more detailed information about people’s frustrations while shopping on Amazon and using online reviews, I conducted 5 user interviews.
Key findings:
Some people feel more confident when a product they are looking for has hundreds or even thousands of reviews, because there is more data and possibly more trust.
Visual and in depth written reviews help the most because it gives a feeling of honesty.
Participants would like to have more control over their selections rather than having writing limitations or many ads popping up.
Sometimes people would spend hours gathering all the information about the product so they could get the best option.
Design Process
Mapping out user flows helped me identify problems and improvements that could be made in order to strengthen the users' experience in reaching their objective. I created three user flows based on common tasks that the user would likely be navigating while using the plug-in app.
Flow 1
Filter Products
Flow 2
Filter Online Reviews
Flow 3
Check Account Score & Write A Review
Having these user flows in mind, I started visualizing screens through quick sketches. Then I conducted 5 interviews to validate my ideas and suggested solutions. I needed to learn what main issues people were facing while using this early-stage prototype.
After validating my main ideas, I started creating wireframes with the hope of proposing new product design changes based on conducted interviews, feedback, new findings, and discoveries.
These low fidelity screens helped me to better understand what layout, features and functionalities help boost user confidence in order to achieve their goals efficiently.
Usability Testing
I further develop a high-fidelity prototype according to previous discoveries and improvements. My goal was to demonstrate how the plug-in app would look, function and how satisfied each participant was while using the app and it’s features.
It was important to identify any usability problems from the mobile app TrustView, discover where users encountered confusion while completing a task, and if the problem/confusion was experienced with multiple participants.
1st Round Usability Testing
Insights And Findings
2nd Round Usability Testing
Insights And Findings
Final Design
Creating TrustView gave me a lot of hope that there should be a way of how we can help online shoppers to be confident in their shopping decisions. I believe that by having a better filtering system people would be able to have more control in seeing opinions of others that look more trustworthy.
Improvements
New Features
Notes & Next Steps
This was my very first design project working on the mobile app where I got introduced to the research methods, design thinking and learned the importance of each step in the design process.
For the future upgrades this mobile app will have shorter navigation steps, developed reminders and repetitive buttons, explanations of the point system and more.
Overall, the final usability testing confirmed the positive outcome of the app and it’s intention. People believed that it would help them to save time while shopping online, motivate them to be more proactive in leaving an online review and make them feel ensure about their purchases.
Sources
Research data:
Forbes - https://www.forbes.com
Luiza Zhou - https://www.luisazhou.com
NY Times - https://www.nytimes.com
Statista - https://www.statista.com
Time - https://business.time.com
Illustrations:
Created by Storyset at https://www.freepik.com, modified by me.
Created by Starline at https://www.freepik.com, modified by me.