TARGET Home Mobile APP

I was tasked to develop an e-commerce mobile application for a design challenge as part of a group collaboration project with 2 other UX Designers. Our hypothetical client was Target. Our job was to create a new application dedicated to their home & garden products.

Design Brief

" TARGET wants to push sales and its brand awareness for its home goods products. Part of the sales initiative is to develop an app that will allow users to only shop for TARGET home products, receive exclusive access to home goods promotions, and be able to shop limited edition collections."

My Role

As co-leader my job was to keep our group on track to reach certain milestones throughout the process, while my co-leader Eunice Do was charged with keeping us on track with our daily tasks. The group shared responsibilities through the entire process so no one person was in sole charge of the research, plan or design phases. I think this helped us to stay with one coherent vision as we moved through the different phases.

Aspects we considered

  • How do we increase home goods sales and brand awareness without taking away from other merchandise sales?
  • How do we engage customers and incentivize use of the new home goods app?
  • How do we improve upon features and aspects of other Target apps to make the new app a positive user experience?
  • How do users shop using apps on their iPhones and tablet devices?
  • What are customer expectations - and who is the customer?

Research

The first thing I did when we initially converged our group was to dive into the research phase. We hit the ground running by brainstorming a list of potential competitors to Target and looking at their available mobile apps to get a feel of how robust the competition was. I also looked into the most recent shareholders information on Target to get a better understanding of their sales.

Next I looked into domain research. There were a lot of recent studies and articles that we drew this research from. Notably from Forbes, as well as a Facebook study that was released only a week before specifically looking into the trends and attitudes toward mobile shopping. Not surprisingly, millennials are the biggest demographic to use mobile shopping at 57%.

PLAN

Next, I co-wrote a screener which roughly 80 participants responded to. From there we picked out 9 candidates who fit our conception of those who shop via mobile.

 

I interviewed 3 candidates. The results yielded a variety of attitudes which we gathered to form an affinity map, which I pulled from to create our concept map.

From the affinity map I helped create the persona hypothesis of Kelsie Matsen. We imparted the traits and demographics we were targeting for the app. Namely, making her a millennial, a mother to a young son and someone who actively searches for the best deals.

design

Next, I began sketching ideas for the layout and design of the app. My team and I converged and shared our sketches during a design charrette exercise. This refinement process was crucial to establishing a coherent group vision.

prototype

After agreeing on our layout, I created a clickable wire-frame prototype of the home screen; 'kitchen & dining' categories screen; the table products screen; the filter menu and refined table screen; and the product description screen using Axure.

test

Initially, I did remote testing on a desktop monitor because my test subjects were out of state. However, it quickly became apparent that the results were inconclusive due to the fact that our subjects tried interacting with the prototype as if it were a desktop site and not a mobile app. For example, they would reach for the keyboard to input text as opposed to clicking on the on-screen keyboard. After this I made sure to do all future testing on the actual device for which the app was being designed.

 

One design I was particularly concerned with was the filter pop out screen. Mostly I wanted to see if people saw it and how long it took them to do so. As a group we had mixed results with the pop out, with most of our testers capably finding it in a reasonable amount of time.

 

I gradually placed higher fidelity images and refinements into the prototype. I also adjusted the global navigation systems and made them more elegant. Also, at this point I helped create the icons on the bottom button bar. We liked how Target used simple line art for their icons, so we tried to mimic a similar style when designing our buttons.

 

We continued testing and iterating as much as we could this point. I also made the decision to exclusively test in the wild with complete strangers and only using an iOS device. It was my hypothesis that this would yield the least biased testing results.

next steps

  • Further testing on filter pop out menu
  • Refine the geo locations features
  • Test users willingness to use geo location features
  • Measure sales results with new app