Product Name: Scoop Website Redesign
Client Name: Scoop
Project Role: UX Researcher/Designer
Collaborators: Nicole Gonthier and Molly Nation
Project Start: June 2018
Project Duration: 3 weeks
Design Tools Used: Sketch, Keynote, InVision

I. Project Summary

Scoop is an on-demand service that helps people get rid of unwanted items (especially clothing) in an environmentally friendly way. Scoop strives to own the life cycle of clothes and help the planet and its people in the process. Tulani Watkins of Scoop reached out to GA seeking assistance with improving the usability of her website, and we were there to respond to the call!

Scoop seeks to do good by the world and its people by reducing textile wastes via an on-demand service and friendly, in-person pickups. Along with two other UX Designers, I set out to evaluate the shortcomings of the website (usescoop.com) in its current form and find ways to improve the user flow. This project culminated in two clickable prototypes (one for the mobile platform and one for the desktop platform) that went through a specific user flow that would be frequently performed by users of Scoop’s website.

II. Research

Even before meeting with the client for the first time, we began by performing a heuristic evaluation using the LEMErS method. I went through the flow of scheduling a pickup on the existing website, verbally expressing my thoughts and frustrations along the way while Molly and Nicole took notes and assigned my grievance to a category. We found a number of issues, particularly with Learnability.

After meeting with Tulani for the first time, we were feeling overwhelmed; we had a ton of questions going into that initial meeting (derived mainly from our heuristics-violation-finding-mission), and while many of them were addressed after speaking with her, we were also met with so many other thoughts and ideas that all 3 of us weren’t really sure where to begin.

After consulting with our “Creative Directors” (aka, Instructors), we set to work throwing everything we had just heard onto a wall and trying our best to categorize it. We needed to determine what we would work on, what we wouldn’t work on, and how to make sense of everything in general. This exercise proved valuable as we were able to get a much clearer picture this way.

The entire wall, plus a few important sections in particular. I personally made a point of not making any tear-related goals for myself.

After this exercise, it was time to go out and talk to users. We constructed an interview script that discussed the user’s thoughts and habits surrounding how they would go about getting rid of old, unwanted items. These were performed both in-person and remotely, and most (not all) of the interviews ended with a usability test of the flow of scheduling a pickup using the “Gold” level on usescoop.com.

Why Gold?

It’s the first one listed, which is really the main reason why I chose it during my initial run-through (prior to meeting with Tulani).
“Gold” involved more steps than “Silver”.
Related to the above, “Gold” had more opportunities for frustrations and feedback than “Silver”.

For more context around this, this is a diagram of the current flow on Scoop's website, specifically for the Gold price tier:

Lots of pain points, and even areas where users expressed they would leave the site.

In addition to the in-person and remote interviews, we also distributed an online survey through social media, using the same questions; unfortunately, this only yielded 2 responses. We reached out to a large number of current and potential customers provided by Tulani; however, only 1 of them was willing and available to speak with us. Most of the users we spoke with came from our own personal networks, and covered a variety of use cases, including:

Cleaning out one’s closet of old items that hadn’t been worn in a long time.
Moving (not just with clothes, but with furniture and other items as well).
Cleaning out a home after a family member transitions (passes away, moves to a retirement home, etc.).
Having a large amount of leftover merchandise following a major event.

The last 3 seemed the most promising, and also represented a shift for Scoop; up to this point, they had wanted to focus almost exclusively on clothes. However, it was becoming increasingly clear to us that what people really wanted was a way to move larger items, and they would even be willing to pay a premium price for a service like this.

A bit of a curve ball was thrown at this point when Tulani added a “Move-Out” option to Scoop’s website; after speaking with her, we found that this involved an in-person consultation and covered a variety of items outside of clothing! There was our ultimate use case! But, as we had already decided by this point that we would be redesigning the Gold flow in particular, we chose not to dive too deep into it.

As part of the research process, we also called 4 different consignment businesses that operate in LA to learn more about their process for getting rid of unsold stock. We found that every one of them followed a similar process: A charity (like Salvation Army) would come by on a regular basis, handle all the heavy lifting and paperwork, and they would do this for free. Consignment stores had no shortage of stock or major frustrations with this existing process, so we determined that the consignment/resale option would not be a viable use case for Scoop at this time.

A quick little graphic that quantifies the interviews and usability tests we performed (on the current site and the redesigned one).

Taking in the results of all of our user interviews, we came up with 3 Personas:

Nadia - A young, frequent mover who has a regular need to clear out her closet. Nadia wants to do good for her community but often lacks the motivation to take that first step.

Sam - An Event Producer who wants to make sure leftover merchandise following a large event is taken off her/her client’s hands in a socially and environmentally friendly way.

Louise - An older user who uses social media to sell items from her home and is also very picky about which charities she supports. Additionally, this user needs to ensure the belongings of her loved ones are put to good use after they pass away or otherwise go through a major transition.

User research and personas in hand, we set out to perform affinity mapping to find trends among the responses we got during the user research phase.

Affinity Mapping in action! Feast your eyes on all that research synthesis magic!

This helped us flesh out the personas we had, and also helped us craft our problem statement and feature prioritization. In the end, this proved especially useful for coming up with the problem statement; we had one user quote in particular that we felt was brilliant and completely described the issue at hand:

III. Problem Statement

Taking the above user quote and putting it in a format that more closely matched a typical problem statement, this is what we as a group settled on:

“Scoop users want to do something good with their unwanted items, but the current website feels like more work than they are willing to do.

How might we reduce the friction of using Scoop’s website?”

IV. Design

OK! Now that we had a definitive problem statement, it was finally time to start thinking of what our final product would look like.

The first thing we did as part of the design process was a design studio. Taking up an entire hallway wall in our workspace, we split up to begin sketching how we felt the screens would look (beginning with the home page), so we could better define the user flow and the relationship of items on the screens. When we came together, though, we found that we worked together and bounced ideas off of each other so effectively that we more frequently sketched together going forward.

I hope these pictures convey the sense of scale of this particular design studio; but even this is just a portion of it. We really got a lot done this day.

We also defined our new user flow for the Gold-level pricing tier around this time:

Around this same time, we created a feature prioritization chart. This was important; the client had presented numerous ideas for things she wanted that still needed a significant amount of refining in the planning phases. And of the things that were identified as possibilities, we needed to know which ones would be the most vital to releasing an MVP.

The next step was paper sketches. Using the best practices of the industry, we began with mobile design first, with the idea that creating a desktop-based design would be a stretch goal. We sketched out the screens that covered our chosen flow, which let us get a better sense of scale and each item's spacial relation to all the other items.

Perhaps more importantly, though, it allowed us to put our design in front of users for the first time. Almost immediately after making the paper screens, we put them in front of a couple of users and had them physically click through the user flow. We were quite pleased to see that some of our design choices were being validated and there was very little friction with getting through the flow. In fact, I remember yelling out an enthusiastic "Yes!" (or something to that effect) as soon as our elevator doors closed immediately following the very first usability test. Success finally felt within reach!

Behold, the very first paper sketches of the mobile home page I made, along with all of us actually creating them.

Around this same time, we ran into an issue: Some users had expressed the desire to see a top-level navigation menu, however, we weren't sure what the most desirable way to present this information would be. For this, we decided to conduct an open card sort (though no users suggested anything outside of the items we had proposed). You can see the evolution of our card sorting results, to the navigation menu, to a site map below:

With where we were at this point, we felt comfortable creating digital, medium fidelity wireframes for mobile as well as desktop. It didn’t take long to go from paper mobile to digital mobile, and from digital mobile to digital desktop. We were able to get more usability tests and metrics for both platforms, and even iterated on the design to create a second major revision for the mobile platform. Usability testing continued, and we continued to gather metrics.

What you see here is the list of questions we asked each user following the usability test as part of the qualitative metrics we gathered, and the average value for each response across both mobile and desktop platforms (a 1 indicates the user strongly disagrees with the statement, and a 5 indicates that they strongly agree). While we would like the "user can get information quickly" result to be higher, we're extremely proud that every single user felt strongly that people would be able to learn how to use the website quickly.

Eventually, we closed the book on usability testing and moved the wireframes to high fidelity. No more placeholders, we now had our finalized images and texts. Eventually, we were able to take these high fidelity screens and turn them into clickable prototypes. We presented them (along with a crash course on UX tools and best practices) to Tulani, thus concluding the project.

V. Prototype

You can find the prototypes by clicking here for desktop and here for mobile.

Alternatively, you can watch the video(s) below to see us walking through the designed flow.

VI. Conclusion

Having successfully created a responsive design with a more easily understandable flow, Molly, Nicole, and I presented both prototypes and our research findings to an eager Tulani on July 16, 2018. In addition to the high fidelity prototypes, it had always been our goal to educate Tulani on UX principles and best practices. With all of this in mind, we gave her the tools to continue to improve Scoop and its website, and we are eagerly anticipating watching Scoop thrive as a result.

On a more personal note, it was an honor and a pleasure to work as part of one of the best teams I could have ever asked for. Both Molly and Nicole are smart, passionate, driven women, and I couldn't have asked for better teammates. I learned a great deal about teamwork during this experience, and look forward to taking what I've learned into my next role.

If you have any questions for me on this case study, go ahead and fill out the contact form below!