TARGET Home mobile app

I was tasked with a design exercise to develop an e-commerce mobile application as part of a group collaboration. Our client was Target. Our job was to create a new application dedicated to their home & garden products.

Aspects we considered

My role

As co-leader my job was to keep our group on path to reach certain milestones through out 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 not 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.

The first thing I did when we initially converged our group was to dive into the research phase. We hit the ground running by white boarding 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 we 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%.

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 such candidates. The results yielded a wide variety of attitudes which we gathered in the form of an affinity map. Which I pulled from to create our concept map.

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

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.

After agreeing on our layout I created a clickable wireframe prototype of the home screen, kitchen & dining categories screen, the table products screen, the filter menu and refined table screen as well as the product description screen using Axure.

Initally, 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 the app was being designed for.

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 nav systems and made them more elegant. Also, at this point I helped create the icons on the bottom button bar. We decided to try and stick to Target’s existing app style but to also create them from scratch.

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 most un-biased testing results.



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