A design case study of an online platform to discover discounts of brands.

Outline:

1. Overview,
2. The Challenge,
3. Users and Audiences,
4. Roles and Responsibilities,
5. Scope and Constraints,
6. Process and what I did,
7. Outcome and lessons

Overview

Offkeeper, an app bases platform which connects brands to shoppers for organic discount offers. It's an app where brands post offers and the users discover those categorically in one place, resulting more conversion rate for brands.?

Challenge: To notify the precisely targeted customers about the discount he/she wants.

Brands post discount offer 3-5 time a year. But the problem is, All discount offers aren’t in one place. Customers don’t know which & how much offers going on around them.?Also, Businesses can’t directly reach the target customers who are interested to buy on-sale products.

Users and Audiences

Brands are the user who want to sell discounted products quickly.?Customers, who seek for discount offers to shop their necessary items, are the audiences.

Role and Responsibilities

Scope & Constraint

We found a niche market of sharing only discounted products through an app-based platform. But our constraints was the market size was budget to implement the whole features of the app.

Process and What I Did: Lean UX; as method we used

We initially taken user survey on the app based service of discount discovering. After the positive opinion on quantitative output, we moved to Build-Measure-Learn process.?

Step 1 : User-flow

I made the user-flow diagram to facilitate the shared understanding among team members on main flow of the app.

Step 2: Then I designed high-fidelity wireframes and made the prototype of the design in InVision and tested on few users and team members.

Step 3: ?Next, I designed the screens and states needed for both side interaction. User side and brand side.

Step 4: ?As the number of screen grows, I designed a design system so that I can make any change quicker. It also helped my team to understand the interactions, because, all interactions could not be shown in video prototype.

Step 5: A video work-through of full app for developers to understand the flow of the app. It helped our team significantly and reduce redundant communications among us.

Step 6: Finally, after developing MPV, we conducted user interviews over 13 peoples.

Why I chose Lean UX??

Because it save huge time which would be wasted otherwise on unnecessary interviews, focus-groups. We planned to implement the features beyond MVP after taking user reviews on MVP.

The result:

We found 3 features which enabled us to get proper users for the discount offers.

1. An app where users browse offers and can "Follow" the offer to get notifications before expiry.?
2. To get instant ALERT of favorite brands's future offers, he will add the brand to "Favorite Brands".?
3. Also, to get alert of every offers of any specific category, he has to "Pin" the category.

What I learnt:

After releasing the MVP, users was excited. But 1 problem occurred. We did not researched the target market enough. We realized that, the target niche market is too small to generate even operation expenses of a medium startup. And If we raise the price, the Facebook become better option than Offkeeper.

All we needed funding to make value adding features to distinguish Offkeeper from Facebook tools. But there was no funds.

Outcome and Lessons

The app loved by users; with some suggestions. We should make a design system and style guide before development. It’s hard to change even a tiny detail of a design if it is big. It’s also helpful in developing.?

Also, an upfront video work-through video worked fantastic for my team which reduced information asymmetry significantly.