PURPOSE

Buy&Seek tries to help busy individuals shop faster by making in-store info available proactively - enabling users to locate, confirm, & purchase products more efficiently.

TIMELINE

3-week sprint from March 27 – April 17, 2023.

TEAM SIZE

3 teammates divided roles by interest: 1 UX researcher, 2 UI designers. I led visual design & prototyping while contributing to UX research efforts.

We conducted 6 remote interviews, synthesized insights into an affinity diagram, and identified 4 core user frustrations:

• Wasting time or money while shopping
• Uncertainty about product availability
• Stress from store crowding
• Difficulty locating or approaching store staff

We also ran a competitive analysis of 5 diverse shopping tools. Gaps identified across competitors included:

• No live crowd tracking
• Minority of live chat or in-store assistance tools
• No real-time product inventory or integrated store mapping

These findings shaped our user persona, Eli Young, which we used to inform our design decisions.

A user scenario contextualized the problem for us to devise a journey map and user flow, modeling how Eli Young might engage with the app at each juncture, surfacing usability concerns early.

Using “I Like, I Wish, What If” brainstorming, we organized 45 ideas into an affinity map, then leveraged a prioritization matrix to isolate 3 high-impact, low-complexity features:

• Searchable in-store inventory
• Live store busyness indicators
• In-app live chat with store associates

Thus, our problem statement became: We believe that enabling busy individuals to proactively look up product availability, location, store traffic, and assistance, will streamline their shopping experiences by increasing efficiency.

We followed an iterative prototyping approach using sketches, wireframes, & interactive builds:


• Lo-fi prototype: Combined top-voted features from team sketches, used to validate navigation & user interactions.

• Mid-fi prototype: Applied iOS Human Interface Guidelines, integrated user feedback, and reflected a refined style tile.

• Hi-fi prototype: Built from a comprehensive style guide, used to code a functional front-end simulating one complete user flow.


Prototypes evolved through user testing & direct iteration, resulting in a solution tailored to real user needs.

We ran remote guerrilla tests using Zoom & Google Meet:

• Lo-fi testing (5 users): 93.3% avg task completion
• Mid-fi testing (4 users): 100% task completion


Lo-fi feedback revealed issues with unclear wording and a lack of visual hierarchy.

Mid-fi feedback concerned the interactive hierarchy of primary features and an incomplete store associate interaction.

Final deliverables included a polished hi-fi prototype & coded front-end demo, which we presented to our UX cohort.

• Designed 4 prototypes: lo-fi, mid-fi, hi-fi, & coded front-end
• Collaborated on 11 UX artifacts, such as Affinity Diagrams and a User Persona, to guide design decisions.
• Conducted 2 usability tests & helped reframe insights into actionable design decisions
• Defined user flow logic to reduce cognitive friction & support feature prioritization