How to help local shops or practitioners to improve their online presence by designing or redesigning a website during pandemic?
By: Megha Parekh
Tags: UX Design, UX Research, Redesign, UX, Redesign Challenge

Ironhack’s 2nd week project as a UX designer

Context

Due to COVID-19 local shops and practitioners are suffering a decrease in the demand of their services and products. This can affect local economies and many families. If you want to compete on this digital market it is important to have an online presence for any local services providers. During my learnings at Ironhack, one of my project was to help these local shops or practitioners to improve their online presence to be more competitive in the actual market.

Challenge

Design or redesign a desktop website for a local business or professional.

Emphasis more on benchmarking and market research.

Analyse what is already there and propose a better solution for the store’s online presence

Select Client

We were a group of three UX designer, kind and humble. We wanted to help a cleaning service provider, as in this crisis it is difficult for them to reach out their clients. Normally they use face to face interaction when they searched for their clients and now during the lockdown, the situation become tough for them. They are unable to know the demands in the market and to contact the right person is also seems impossible for them.

Empathize Phase

Our first step is to develop a deep understanding of the problem by following business analysis and user research.

Market Research:

We did market research to identify well known cleaning service providers in France. We decide to go with NHPS, O2, Wecasa, Companeo, Confov and Spicandspan. Furthermore, we divided in two for each to identify their existing features, services they offered and their reviews on google. Finally we found our client Confov to redesign their existing website https://confov.fr/ to help them to reach out to their clients easily.

2. Business & Competitive Analysis:

Understanding the business:

Founded in 2015, CONFOV is a cleaning company oriented towards the needs of its partners. (B2B service provider)

They are present in major cities of France such as Nice, Cannes, Marseille, Lyon, Valence, Montpelier and Strasbourg.

User research:

To identify actual needs and problems of users we have to talk with them. By reaching out to them, you will know about their expectations and pain points of the existing website. We choose interview (qualitative method) to gather more information.

The Followings are the statements from our three users interviews:

“How should we collaborate during the pandemic?”

“It’s too hard to get in contact with the company.”

“Where can I find the price?”

“I need to see user’s reviews about the company.”

Stakeholders Interview:

Our stakeholders are like founder of Confov, Market specialist, branding specialist of Confov. We managed to have a direct interview with them to better understand their business. So before contacting them we started to prepare interview scripts. We asked questions like about the company, their roles, services they offered, their target market, communication source, how they worked on users feedbacks?, what they do for improvements of their website, what are their future concerts etc…. We managed to conducted two interviews, where I was the observer.

Competitive Analysis

A competitive analysis is a strategy where you identify major competitors and research their products, sales, and marketing strategies. So to identify competitors we have begun with feature analysis.

Feature analysis:

Branding Analysis :

Market Positioning

As per our analysis we’ve found out that our ideal brand is Spic&span which is highest in terms of innovation and luxury. On the other hand we observed that Confov is also trying to reach luxury, but because of lack of innovation our brand is unable to create a good position in the market.

3. Affinity Diagram

So after business analysis and competitive analysis we have a lot of data, so we have to structure it. So we decided to do brainstorming on information we all had. Then we cluster out our data and created four main categories.

Information Quantity Accessibility Website Architecture Other

4. User Person & User Journey Map

After gathering all information we managed to identify pain points and gains of our users. So to keep our user in mind during the whole process we have created a user persona, and we wanted to understand our user’s current journey, so we managed to create that one too.

User Journey Map

Define Phase

Now we are at the point where we will be able to define a problem of our user. So to define it precisely we did HOW Might we. Every time when we have to decide we choose brainstorming method to select the best and accurate one.

How Might we chart:

Followings are our main three How Might We’s define problem statements:

HMW create a platform which has enough organized information about the company and its services? HMW create a platform where users can collaborate and communicate with the company easily? HMW create an e-contracting workflow to facilitate company’s interaction with B2B users?

Problem Statements

“Busy Arnaud needs to get informed, communicate and enter into contract with the cleaning service company online, because it is difficult to partner and collaborate due to the pandemic restrictions.”

Hypothesis

“We believe redesigning an engaging and collaboration-based platform for Busy Arnaud will achieve our goal of having an end-to-end service in one place. We will know we are right when more than 90 % of interactions are online.”

Ideate Phase

Now we know our problem and goal so we started to brainstorming of ideas as many as possible and for that we have created an ideation board.

Prioritization of Information

There are so many methods are available to do prioritization of information, and we choose the most famous one MOSCOW priority method.

Where our main “must have” are the following:

Add price estimation facility

Add booking system

A feedback section/Testimonials

A contract workflow and e-signature

2. MVP — Minimum Viable Products

“Our website enables users to get in touch directly with the company, have all the information about available services, get an estimated price for the chosen service, and sign the contract online.”

3. Website Content Audit

As our client is already in presence online we have to redesign their website. So before started to redesign it is important to audit existing website. It will help to understand their current flows and algorithms. So we divided important pages to audit the whole website.

4. Site Map

Site map is important to understand components of website. We did two site map, 1st site map is as-is and 2nd is to-be.

So you can see on the above site map we have highlighted new features we wanted to add. As now our main focus is to give organized information, e-contracting facility and easy price estimation feature which was not exist.

5. User Flow

To keep our “must have” in mind we have decided to fulfil user flow. Which is “How user can submit partnership request via website?”

Prototyping Phase

Lo-fi Wire framing

Now when it comes to finally work on solutions, we started to do brainstorming of ideas we have in our mind. We wanted to select the best possible idea to solve our user’s problems.

2. Mid Fidelity Wire framing

3. High Fidelity Prototyping

Click here to see Hi-FI: Here

Testing Phase

Before working on high fidelity we’ve decided to do a usability test on our Mid-fi with users.

Step 1: Friendly Welcome

Step 2: Context questions

Step 3: Introducing prototype

Step 4: Tasks

Step 5: Quick Debrief

Followings are the main insights from our usability testing:

User A didn’t understand how to get back to the simulation page: “We can’t go back directly to service pages after the simulation page. I need to compare the services”

User A prefers to have information on services one by one and choose what she wants.

User D says: “At first, I didn’t understand why to simulate but after with the flow, it was more clear”.

User E finds that he doesn’t need ‘Hours/Day’ in the Appointment page because the service duration depends on the company and its way to deliver the service.

Learnings

I learned time management during the project as we only had 1 week to deliver our project.

Team collaboration and understanding is very important when you have limited time to deliver it.

I learned how to be patience with others.

The Most important thing I learned is the whole process of redesigning website from the beginning. It was fun and amazing to know users journey with existing products it will give you instant ideas of needs of users.

There are many methods to complete user experience process, and you will learn it during the project.

Sometimes it happens when you finally identified the flow you wanted to work on, but then you realized there are other flows are interconnected, so you have to consider every possible aspects of your user flow.

Testing part is very important before you start working on your hi-fi prototype. It will help you to save you lots of time.

Thank you so much for your time and any suggestions would be appreciated.