Ultimate Shopper

Shopping has never been easier

An all-in-one creative shopping app that makes your life easier and greener.

 Overview

The world doesn’t need another shopping app? --  I don’t agree!
Ultimate Shopper was created for smart shoppers, those who enjoy finding great deals and are dedicated to a sustainable lifestyle. Ultimate Shopper offers a creative solution for its users to conduct price comparison, selling, and trading in just one simple step.
Online shoppers are frustrated with the current products they use to find the best deals or sell used stuff. Consumers who have strong environmental awareness also want to trade for what they need instead of buying more. While there are multiple apps that offer one or two functions they need, none successfully provide users with all the features they want to make a confident decision in one seamless experience. Instead, they flip between multiple apps to search and cross-check what they find on the others, which makes the shopping experience very complicated and time-consuming.

Problem:

Ultimate Shopper integrates and improves upon the most wanted features of competing products to solve user pain points. Simplifying the process of finding the best price online & in local stores, finding possible trading options locally & by mail, and selling without exposing unnecessary personal info.

Solution:

My Role: UX Research, UI Design, Product Design

Online shopping essentials

 Discover

Initial research focused on better understanding users’ needs related to comparing product prices, and selling & trading items. 
  1. What products exist to find the best prices, sell used items, and trade items with others?
  2. How do users interact with existing products?
  3. What are users' current pain points with existing products?
  4. Which features are essential to creating an innovative new shopping app?

Focus Areas:

Survey

A survey was conducted on 40 participants to identify which products and features people are currently using and determine which features are essential for the new app.
  • 85% of participants said they need a better app to help them compare prices.
  • 95% of participants are interested in knowing which local store offers the best price.
  • 80% of participants don’t mind buying used products.
  • 72% of participants usually search on 2 or more than 2 platforms when purchasing products.

Key Takeaways:

A series of in-depth interviews were then conducted on 3 participants to further identify pain points, frustrations, needs, and desires with existing products to determine how Ultimate Shopper could improve this experience.

User Interviews

  1. All participants used a combination of multiple apps when comparing prices, selling, or trading. 
  2. Users value the ability to know the best price for both online and in-stores. 
  3. Major products in the market lack the ability to meet all user’s needs. 
  4. Users seek trading options in daily life.
  5. Traditional search engines and marketplaces make users feel overwhelmed and unsafe.

Key Takeaways:

Competitive analysis was conducted to identify competitors' strengths and weaknesses to inform Ultimate Shopper's features and information structure.

Competitive & Comparative Analysis

 

While Capital One Shopping and Google Search share the most similar features with Ultimate Shopper, they both don't offer trading & selling options, and Google doesn’t offer a seamless app experience (the app Google Shopping was shut down in 2019) -- it’s difficult to save the results on your phone.

Key Takeaways:

Carving out a niche in a saturated market

Define

After conducting user interviews, all the participants responses were synthesized to identity themes, opportunities, and features that Ultimate Shopper could focus and improve upon.
  A persona was built based on the data collected to help drive decision making and keep the product focused on solving users pain points, frustrations, and goals.

 Persona

Building up a better experience

Ideate

To kick-off the design process, quick sketches helped me get ideas on paper to establish which elements were necessary for each screen. Then a low-fidelity prototype was created for initial user testing.
The primary user flow is the process of buying, selling and trading on the app.

User Flow

Rough sketches were done to get my initial thoughts on paper and brainstorm new ideas for specific UI elements.

Sketches

Low Fidelity Prototype

Clickable Low-Fi Prototype on Balsamiq

Wireframes

usability testing was conducted to determine where improvements could be made and identify new ideas to satisfy user expectations, needs, and desires.

 

Usability Testing

  1. Add a “Just browsing” button on the landing page for new users who don’t have a specific task in their minds.
  2. Add multiple filters in addition to “rank by price”, users are also interested in knowing distance, ratings and new-ins.
  3. Add a location label/sticker on each trading list since it is one of the most important factors for users.

Key Takeaways:

Simple, Fun and Futuristic

Design

Inspired by the newest trends and technologies in 2022 including Metaverse, James Webb Space Telescope and Pantone’s color of the year 2022, I decided to use the color Forgotten Purple and Stellar Explorer to achieve a simple and futuristic design -- with a fun touch of Neumorphism and Glassmorphism.

Moodboard for Ultimate Shopper

Design Guidelines

High Fidelity Prototypes

 Prototyping

Play with my prototypes 😉

An innovative all-in-one platform offers a seamless shopping experience

Solution

Telling the users the main functions of the app by using simple and breezy illustrations.

Onboarding / Sign In

Buying journey offers price comparison from 3 different sources: online, in-store and in-app used items’ listings.

Buy

Buying online? 
Click “see more” to access the full results and use the filter. You can save the listing with one click on your app. 
If you’re ready to purchase, our app will direct you to the platform automatically.

Buy Online

Need to get it now? 
Find your favorite in-store options ranked by distance, you will be directed to the store with one click.


Buy In-stores

Trade

Tired of buying new Christmas and other seasonal decorations every year? Wanna try some new fragrances but still have a lot of unfinished ones? Have a spare laptop but need a second phone? 
Try our new trading options instead of buying more. It’s not only nice for your wallet, but also good for our planet.

2 simple ways to explore our trading options — by categories, or by our user’s wishlists.
It’s as easy as chatting with a friend.
Find an item you’re interested in trading with, send messages to the person, after you both agree to trade, set both of your goods for the same price, so basically you get that for free.
The system will generate a trading code for both of you. Type in the code before you check out. Ta-Da ~ Your trading is successful!
If you’re in the same city, feel free to talk to the person to arrange a pick-up. It’s all up to you!
Tip: Don’t forget to check that person’s wishlist before you ask to trade!

How to Trade

Post your selling lists on our app, you will get a bigger audience.
Your listing will be seen by everyone who is searching for it, including those ones who are making price comparison for the new products. (under the In-app listings section)

Sell

Tip: Tradable or Only for Sale? It’s customizable!
Buying, Selling, Trading… all your activities can be easily managed here. 
Different color themes according to the buttons on the home page, help you to better understand where you are.

Account

Love the pair of jeans your friend is wearing?
Simply scan your picture — Ultimate Shopper will help you to get these in a sec!

Photo Search

Want an easier search by scanning the barcode on its label?
That’s no problem!

Barcode Search

 

Next Steps:

  • Develop a desktop version to meet all users’ preferences.
  • Create a dark mode version.
  • Create a social-media-like community where people can share their experiences and opinions — this will enhance the credibility of our users, hence resulting in more trading orders generated by mutual trust in the community.

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