During the pandemic, my colleagues, Mitch McKain. Eugene Pokrovsky, and I challenged ourselves with completing a remote hackathon style group challenge. We chose Online Marketplaces as our problem area and began brainstorming and researching potential problem spaces within the area.
People under the age of 24 (Generation Z) can be hesitant to use online marketplaces like Kijiji or Facebook Marketplace because the process of meeting up with someone you know little about can make you feel scared, intimidated or anxious.
Make both the buyer and seller feel comfortable before setting out to meet with one another by providing both parties with more in depth information that make them feel safe and in control at all times.
As a group we initially were not sure how to best narrow the scope of our demographic. Our first broad assumption before completing any research was that women would be the demographic most concerned about online marketplace safety.
We created an online survey to gain a better understanding of how different individuals use and feel about online marketplaces.
Our survey received over 100 responses and gave us valuable insight into who is most concerned about online marketplace safety and how we could go about approaching their concerns.
After completing demographic research we narrowed our scope to directly look at the problems that Generation Z faces while buying or selling on online marketplaces. More so than older generations, Gen Z is comfortable with the concept of buying and selling items online. They are the first generation to grow up in the era of social media.
From our research we learned that age played the biggest factor in whether a user feels safe communicating with another individual from an online marketplace. Gen Z is particularly concerned about their safety when meeting another individual physically in order to buy or sell an item.
Using our compiled research, we created two personas that represent what Gen Z needs when using an online marketplace and what some of their pain points are throughout the experience.
With our two users in mind, we journey mapped what Aliyah and Charlie's experiences would be while buying or selling something on an online marketplace and subsequently meeting up with another individual.
Creating our user journeys really visualized for us that the biggest pain point for our users came from preparing and attending for the in person meetup.
Now that we had a good understanding of our demographic and their problem, we used digital sticky notes to brainstorm solutions to various pain points. Through many rounds of iterations we landed on a suite of features designed with the goal of making sure each user feels informed, safe and in control at all times.
With our suite of features decided on, we discussed and visually laid out the process of how our users would move through their marketplace experience. We divided the process into 7 segments.
Before we moved onto any UI prototyping, we finalized and laid out a system map by utilizing our now established user flow.
Our goal with our prototype was to implement our new features seamlessly into Kijiji's existing design guidelines. Through our wireframes, we designed, tested and iterated 22 screens overtime.
After testing and finalizing our wireframe prototype, we developed high fidelity mockups by applying Kijiji's branding, ensuring that all new additions fit well into Kijiji's existing brand guidelines.
I worked on this project remotely alongside my colleagues, Mitch McKain and Eugene Pokrovsky. Even though we worked remotely from our homes, we strived to make our group process as interactive as we could.
We improved each others workflows by sharing programs and techniques we had each learned throughout the pandemic. Programs like Mural and Notion allowed us to share ideas and work with each other seamlessly.
My personal goal for this project was to further develop and refine my UX research process. I wanted to focus on gaining meaningful insights through my research. Parsing through the data we collected and finding patterns that led to our solution was a rewarding process that I look forward to refining further in future projects.
If given the time to continue working on this project, I would like to spend time conducting in person user tests with out demographic using our high fidelity mockups to gain a better understanding of how we could expand the project to better serve the needs of Gen Z and all Kijiji users.
