UX Design Certificate Capstone Project
As the project lead for an eight-week capstone project, I collaborated with TeamCarts to create a solution for their social commerce app. Our cross-functional team focused on enhancing customer loyalty and generating valuable insights for TeamCarts' growth. This effort culminated in the design of an In-Cart Chat feature that impressed TeamCarts with our attention to detail and received positive feedback from test participants.
Design Preview
With a chat for each cart, discuss items with friends.
Chat about specific items in threads opened from the cart or from within the chat.
Directly edit your cart from the chat. You can add, delete, and swap items.
Project Challenges
Before delving into our design process, it's crucial to understand the challenges we encountered.
These obstacles shaped our approach and informed our solutions throughout the key stages of planning, research, and workshopping.
By contextualizing these challenges upfront, you'll gain a deeper appreciation for the strategic decisions and innovative solutions detailed in "The Design Process" below.
1. Scope Myopathy
2. Limited Data Insights
3. Maintaining Focus
Invigorated by the kickoff, the team initially aimed to limit the scope to a usability audit and onboarding redesign. Confining the project risked hindering an innovative design that would challenge client assumptions while aligning business and user needs. The challenge became broadening the scope to create something innovative without stifling my team's creativity.
TeamCarts restricted our access to crucial analytics and a recruitment channel of current users. This limited our ability to benchmark the existing user experience and thoroughly evaluate it from the outset. The lack of access to current users hampered proactive identification of potential issues before kicking off the project.
As a new UX team of primarily visual designers, we struggled to maintain focus on our objective and core value proposition amidst client feedback and data overload. It was easy to get pulled away from the overarching goal and design the wrong thing.
1. Kickoff Meeting
Leveraging my passion for strategy and my research background, I was appointed as the lead by a my group that included one researcher and three visual designers.
I initiated the design process with a focused kickoff meeting, using prepared questions to learn about TeamCarts.​​
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Key findings included:​
Vision​​
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An app that aims to address the challenge of curating and sharing product discoveries across scattered platforms.
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Addresses the problem by centralizing product curation and sharing to empower users to organize and collaborate on shopping lists within their social circles to make informed decisions.​
​Target Audience
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Presumed by TeamCart's to be Gen Z and Millennials.​
Business Needs
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Improve user engagement and retention.
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Gain insights users.
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Reduce user abandonment.
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Identify usability issues.​
2. Planning
Given the team's creative energy and potential to limit the scope, I realigned our focus with TeamCart's core business objectives to:
​Develop a design solution that would cultivate deeper customer loyalty and unlock invaluable insights to pave the way for TeamCarts' growth and long-term success.
​This scope would allow us to simultaneously meet client requirements while allowing room for creativity and to challenge assumptions.
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I encouraged my team to record all their ideas in FigJam (pictured), an online whiteboard tool, so we could revisit them if they were substantiated in research.
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For details on on our specific strategy, success metrics, and research plan use tabs below.
To address TeamCarts' business needs, we devised to build something that would:
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Engage users
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Prolong usage
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To actualize that vision, we strategized to:
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Undertake a comprehensive research initiative to validate the assumed Gen Z and millennial audience or identify a new one to design for.
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Conduct a thorough audit of the existing experience to identify usability issues.
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Leverage these invaluable insights to craft a prototype that fosters a seamless user experience, to foster and increase user engagement.
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Challenge
While drafting our research plan we learned we would have limited access to key metrics on timed usage, or have access to current users to evaluate their experience, so we shifted the scope to focus on:
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Understanding TeamCarts' ideal user base and tailoring the design to their needs to foster meaningful engagement.
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Cultivating deeper customer engagement which could organically lead to increased app time.
3. Research
I distilled our findings into empathy and journey maps, to provide a holistic understanding of our users and TeamCarts' unique value proposition.
These visual tools enabled us to uncover deeper insights into user needs, behaviours, and pain points, while creating a narrative that highlights strategic opportunities for product development.
For a detailed breakdown of our synthesis process and actionable insights, please scroll below these research artifacts.
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Empathy Map
An empathy map is a visualization tool that helps UX designers contextualize users needs in order to tailor the design to them and generate value.
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This empathy map considers the ideal user experience based on insights from user interviews and other research.
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The ideal user relies on social proof for confident purchase decisions, finding the abundance of products overwhelming and the product info untrustworthy. They arm themselves with research and opinions to navigate the space.
Journey Map
A journey map is another visualization tool that helps UX designers understand the steps users take to accomplish their goals.
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The journey map examines social commerce consumers' experiences, identifying where TeamCarts fits and establishing areas for improvement [collection and vetting] and opportunity [discovery, exploration, purchase, loyalty] in our brainstorming.
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The map's purpose is to explore and implement new features that will help TeamCarts assert itself more strongly within the consumer's process, keeping them engaged and aligned with TeamCart's business needs.
Our comprehensive research yielded a wealth of data, initially overwhelming the team.
To effectively distill this information into actionable insights, I implemented a structured collaborative process:
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Team members cross-reviewed each other's work.
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Each member identified key takeaways.
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I then prioritized insights based on:
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Potential to drive customer engagement.
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Feasibility within project timeline.
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Alignment with TeamCarts' growth objectives.
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This approach resulted in six high-impact, actionable insights that guided our brainstorming workshop.
4. Workshopping i
To develop a design concept and prototype, I facilitated a workshop to:
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Hone on TeamCarts unique value
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Prioritize our research insights
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Sketch ideas based on value and insights
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Distill sketches into concepts for client selection
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To identify TeamCart's unique value, each team member came prepared with their own value proposition diagram. We synthesized these diagrams together at the outset of the workshop.
To combat scope creep we collectively mapped out and prioritized our research insights, combining them with the value proposition to inform sketching.
Proposing Value
This is a value proposition map which illustrates the intersection of business offerings and user needs to reveal the unique synergy that makes the product unique and desirable.
Synergies included:
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informed purchase decisions
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trusted social proof
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limiting product overwhelm
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enjoyable collaborative shopping experience.
Determining Focus
To align our efforts with TeamCarts' needs and maximize impact, we created a priority matrix based on our research insights.
We evaluated potential impact, feasibility, and alignment with business objectives to determine our focus areas:
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Onboarding: client-requested, research-backed, and aligned with project goals.
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Collaborative Research: identified as a key opportunity in journey mapping and value proposition analysis.
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Cart Creation: emerged during sketching as an essential collaborative feature enhancing overall user experience.
5. Workshopping ii
With the value proposition and prioritized insights in mind, I facilitated a brainstorming exercise to sketch ideas.
After the workshop, we took a day to reflect on our collective sketches and then voted and selected three concepts that best addressed the project objective. These were developed into mockups to present to the client.
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The client chose the in-cart chat concept which allows users to connect with their inner circle while shopping, enabling real-time discussions to help with shopping choices. This aims to keep users engaged and reduce cart abandonment.​​
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To view my initial sketches and more details on our concept development, please use the tabs below.
In-Cart Chat concept presented to the client
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Onboarding survey that allows users to express their values to personalize their experience and reduce app abandonment.
A gamified mood board for clothing integrated into the chat, to bring unified look to life and engage friends for feedback.
An in-cart chat which allows users to vet and edit products in-context of their carts.
6. User Testing
User testing was a co-creation activity with participants to help ideate and validate the cart and chat integration.
We developed a testing-friendly prototype in Figma, an interface design tool, which helped to realign with our objectives and incorporate learnings into the final design.​​
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From the testing we aimed to learn about the usability of the cart and chat interplay, what information architecture resonates with users, and features that would motivate meaningful user engagement.
We learned:​
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Usability: participants could easily access their carts, but struggled to find the in-cart chat feature.
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Information Architecture: participants expressed a strong desire for collaborative features, including the ability to discuss specific items in dedicated chat threads.
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User Engagement: participants preferred a clear text-labeled chat button and suggested gamification elements like points and rewards linked to tangible benefits, such as product discounts.
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See tabs below for more details on our methodology and insights.
Heatmap showing participant difficulty locating in-cart chat
​Testing Tool and Format
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Tested unmoderated via Use berry, an online user testing tool​.
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ideally would have moderated testing to glean in depth-insights​, but strategized unmoderated to meet one week deadline.
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Recruited original interview participants to maximize impact and foster investment.
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30 minutes sessions.
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Combined tasks, preference questions, opinion scales, multiple choice, and short answers.
Prototype developed in Figma for user testing
7. Prototyping
Adhering to the requirements, our team developed this interactive prototype.​
Although this deliverable marked the end of our project, the iterative design process requires ongoing refinements. Therefore, we provided recommendations to TeamCarts to prepare for the design launch available in the Iterating section.
Build and edit your shopping cart solo or with friends. Share any cart with friends granting them viewer access.
Chat directly from your carts with your co-creators or anyone you would like to invite.
Open threads to chat about specific cart items directly from the cart or from within the chat.
From the chat, delete, swap, or add items to your cart. Act on any feedback you get without leaving the conversation.
Project Outcomes
In order to understand how to move forward with the design, here are the project outcomes to position my recommendations:
Our redesign of TeamCarts' iOS app aimed to foster customer loyalty and uncover user insights for growth.
The results were promising:
Client Satisfaction
TeamCarts praised our thorough approach across all project phases. They were particularly impressed with our chat feature integration strategy, which aligned with their internal development plans.
User Satisfaction
User testing revealed positive feedback:​
​"Easy to navigate. The chat feature, especially sharing carts and items, is very appealing."
- Participant 1, female millennial​
"Highlighting products mentioned in chat and adding them easily is perfect."
- Participant 3, male millennial
Future Validation
While initial results are encouraging, further testing is needed to quantify user engagement and validate our design decisions.
We've outlined recommendations for ongoing improvement and measurement.
8. Iterating
Here my recommendations for improving the design to ready it for launch:
1. Immediate Design Updates​
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​Enhance consistency by adding an "Add to Cart" button to existing carts, mirroring the new cart design.
3. Feature Development Based on User Testing
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Prioritize the development of features that users found most appealing like price matching and product recommendation.
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Explore gamification options for the chat feature.​
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Create a streamlined and collaborative chat experience focused on shopping, taking cues from popular messaging apps.​
2. User Testing and Validation
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Perform user testing on the latest design iteration to:​
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Gauge user engagement levels.
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Confirm the effectiveness of the design solution.
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4. Continuous Improvement
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Conduct thorough user testing on all new iterations prior to launch to ensure optimal performance and user satisfaction.