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Selling a better Carousell

The first time I learnt and used a mobile marketplace app was with Gumtree. I was looking for a camera and thought the online marketplace would be a good place to look for bargain steal. I had a decent experience with the app. For the simple task of searching and making offer, the app was clear and straightforward. It was a novel idea then, to stop waste, sell and gain, interact with like-minded users, and feel satisfied for everyone and the environment.

I was not a frequent user anyway. I do not possess too many unnessary items at home, or need many possession. But being a photography enthusiast, once in a while, I would come to Gumtree to look for an affordable lense. I ventured over to Carousell when I had items to sell, and thought to increase my exposure beyond Gumtree. It was not quite so a decent experience as Gumtree. At first touch, I felt lost. The user interface screamed out at me, the colour palette was loud and uncomfortable, items were poorly organized and curated, product description was laboriously lengthy, contents seemed too crammed in together, and why ‘make offer’ when I had already chosen to ‘buy now’? Darn, I cannot even sieve out my preferred Nikon camera brand from the competitors. Unknowingly, I had already conducted my first amatuer heuristic evaluation.

The project involves the revamp of the Carousell app. For a result, we came out with a proposal for an improved Carousell experience instead, and stopped short of evolving the product altogther. The current iteration, in my opinion, is flawed but not broken, and does not call for a complete overhaul. For a brief outline of the design process, the team carried out our own heuristic evaluation, and a study of the competitive landscape for mobile marketplace app. We went out to the field and hunted our friends for interviews, filtered out their opinions, and mapped out their frustration and wishlist. We quickly developed two personas to anchor our design and produced a customer journey map to detail the experience of the current app. Following on, we proposed features, sketched wireframes, built prototypes and carried out sprints of user testing between each stages to validate our iterations efficiently.

In a nutshell, Jennifer is an accountant and leads a busy life. Sometimes too busy to even go out for shopping. So she uses many shopping apps to solve her needs. She has frustration finding the right categories to locate the items, and also complain that items do not deliver as promised. She expects better quality control over product listing, and wishes for a payment system to facilitate transaction.

To help us anchor the design, we created Jennifer as our persona that is based on extensive user research and profiling. Our users come from experienced pool of existing customers, and some new users. In the opening paragraphs, I shared some opinions of my experience with Carousell. Those were echoed among our users. In the interviews, we asked them to tell us stories of their failures with the app, their happy moments, behaviours with online shopping, their wishlist and key frustration with the app. We also asked them to complete three tasks to help them focus on giving critiques along the flow. We asked them to:

The results were analysed and synthesized into bite sized information for the next stage of development: Affinity Mapping.

Coming out with the affinity groupings took half a day’s time for the team. It was not immediately apparent how we could relate the observations at the start while staring at the number of paper post-its on the wall. We made the process easier by categorising into three main groups: Painpoints, Opportunities and Others, then breaking them down further by observing random patterns. These affinity groups allowed us to create Jennifer that is believable and based on thinkings of real people.

We take Jennifer through the current Carousell app, and mapped out her actions, her thinkings, her emotions and her pain points, from login into her account, browsing for a specific item, chatting in-app and making offer to the seller, meeting up and finally giving feedback to the other party. We notice her frustration when she has to sign up before exploring the app, and dealing with an incompetent search via categories when looking for an item. She was annoyed looking through the clutter of information, and irrelevant products, and confused over having to ‘buy now’ and then ‘make offer’ again. She looks forward to chatting up with prospective sellers, but worries about agreeing on a meet up location and time, and the hassle of payment modes. She then thinks about whether the seller is going to be late, or turn up at all. Is the item going to work well after she brings it home? and is she able to get a refund later on? As you can observe, Jennifer’s emotion is hardly a stable ride.

We recognised Carousell users can also be distinctively categorised into a core buyer and a core seller, even as majority conduct both ends of the trade. For the scope of our project, we define Jennifer as a core buyer but also sells at some point in time, and focus our design to elevate the experience of core buyer. For a limited time and resource, the team can only focus on limited portion of the entire app.

I will discuss the limitations of this parochial approach as part of our next step developing this app forward below. From our interviews, we observed the traits of a core seller, and also created that persona. You can find out more about Kelly Koh if you access the link to our presentation deck provided below.

Gathering from Jennifer, who is an embodiment of our real users, we arrived at three main problems:

With these key focuses, the team crafted a problem statement to help us drive the directions to improve:

We came out with a list of solutions to deal with the main problems, and a host of other minor ones. This process took a couple sessions of brainstorming, and references to competitive apps. Some features were innovative, while a few were adopted so Carousell can catch up with competitiors.

To explore without hesitation, we allow our users to continue without login.

To improve search, we give users more parameters to tag their items.

To customize choice of shopping, we introduce interest feeds.

To avoid confusion, we change certain key terminologies.

To increase visibility, we make list view possible.

To reduce visual clutter, we take away a number of irrelevant information from product listing.

To eliminate meet-up delinquency, we implement in-app scheduling calendar to notify users of upcoming meet-ups.

To facilitate convenient transaction (and opening up business revenue), we introduce in-app streamlined delivery and payment system to take user seamlessly from making offer to making payment.

To exercise quality control, we propose Buyer’s Protection scheme as part of the in-app payment process.

and etc.

We spent a large amount of time debating on these features. It is not uncommon for us to go wayward and begun to elaborate on procedures that were not such a huge concern for our users. For example, we debated at length on the demerits of the current feedback system for Carousell users, but found that our users were not so concerned at all. I realised how important it is to keep our eyes on the problem statement, and prioritise proposal to align with users’ painpoints and business goals.

After discussing about the features, two team members capitalised on their skills and went down to sketching paper prototypes, while the others went on to produce the other deliverables. The task was split up distinctly into two parts: before making offer, where search and categorisation of products were looked into; and after making offer, where the chat mechanism and the streamlined process of offer-delivery-payment were elaborated.

prototyping with ink becomes quite a satisfying process

This was where it got a little tricky. When attempting to combine our ideas, from ink to pixel, our chosen tools for prototyping, proto.io, does not allow for collaboration. Really?! No two person can work on the save file and synchronise together. That was a big problem as that implied that the entire prototyping role be delegated to one person. He had to know the features well, possess keen visual design sense, and work under very tight timeline. Read more under team dynamics below.

We did a couple rounds of user testing and iteration that improved the app overall incrementally. Users understood the flow well, and appreciated the new features, but had problems with affordance and some visual representation. Which were not so much big deals. I think we got this.

For this project, I learnt to work with other team members through the entirety of its timeline, and the importance of team dynamics. From this experience, I discover three key impetus for a great teamwork: communication, continuation and collaboration.

Keeping communication is simple, but keeping clear and effective communication that keeps everybody aligned to the same goal is difficult. Recognising and acknowledging one another’s strengths and weaknesses, including my own’s, and then delegating tasks to their appropriate abilities is an important first step. Even accepting them too. I sometimes find discomfort in the tasks I am handled, and wishes to have a hand in other tasks, but I recognise everyone has a part to play, and no one can play every part (affordably). Clearly delineating job scopes, down to the specific deliverables, makes sure everybody does the right thing and not overlap other’s responsibilites.

Continuation is about sustaining relationship to continue the project over and beyond. It will be evident that not eveyone’s abilities par up, and frustration will emerge when tasks are not completed to the team’s expectation. Everyone has different priorities and schedules may not align. Eventually, one may have to accomplish more than the others, or accommodate to the other’s abilities. We have to note to keep emotions aside and explain things for the better of the project, but having moments of interaction beyond the office is essential to continue the team relationship. Ultimately, I feel it is more important to retain awesome interpersonal relationship than to produce an awesome product.

Over the two weeks course of the project, the team members uses limited tools for collaboration. Google drive and group chat are the default options nowadays. While whatsapp allow the team to communicate quickly, google drive gives the team to share and work on files at the same time. For example, two of us were able to work on different portions of the presentation deck together on google slides, and all of us can keep track of schedule and add tasks on cloud-stored excel sheets. However the files quickly accumulate and without a person to meticulously archive the outdated ones, the drive can become disorganized and hard to read. Trello seems to be an organized mobile solution for scheduling and tasks delegation and I would like to see how it could fit in the next team project.

Realtimeboard also proved to be an immensely helpful tool for the team to conduct mapping, present findings or throw just about anything useful for future reference. Pictures, notes, weblink, even big post-its for chatting, the app is highly recommended for collaboration.

One big lament about prototyping using proto.io is the lack of collaboration capability. We find that no two person can work on the same prototype concurrently, or even merge two files together. It became a frustration for me and a 2nd team member as we have to decide on one executive to digitise the two paper prototypes. I carried on to work on the presentation deck, while my mate got the full-on experience to materialise our vision. We tasked the rest of the responsibilities so that he concentrated his time on the prototype while the three of us finished up the rest of the project delieverables.

The app improvements focuses on the experience of a core buyer. They attempt to address the problems at poor search and categorisation of products, a lacking in-app delivery and payment system, and bad quality control of users and products. Some of the proposed measures are applicable to improving the experience of a core seller, but we would also want to develop in-depth other important features. At this juncture, we think more can be done when a seller list their product up for sale, such as including the product in more than one categories to increase exposure. We would also like to review the feedback system as one channel for us to improve quality control of user. Could the current rating system be possibly skewed to make sellers look unrealistically favourable?

Our iteration introduces Carousell Wallet as one of the ways to conduct in-app transaction. There is a huge potential here for the business to tap on this avenue to increase their margin, introduce rewards and incentives and promote user royalty. For the design team, we want to explore the feature and develop new flows and usabilities to attain the business goals.

Cheers :)

how to choose a dslr camera for best photography

Selling a better Carousell

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