Etsy
PROBLEM
Etsy provides a place for makers to sell their goods and reach a large audience. There are many talented individuals who are specially skilled in certain areas. Customers can search for the items they’re looking for, but sometimes they want to customize those items to suit their personal tastes. While there are currently ways for customers to communicate their customizations with sellers via messaging, Etsy would like to create features that easily identify sellers who take requests for customizations and also allow those same sellers to easily take requests.
Task
My team got tasked with integrating a feature into the app Etsy. As a team we had to figure out the best way to make customization on Etsy easier. We did this with a couple of steps.
Defining the problem
Interviewing users
Analyzing and synthesizing our data
Discovery/Selection
Creating personas
Design Studio
Paper wireframes
Feature prioritization
Lo-fi wireframes
Usability Testing
Iterations
Discovery & Research Phase
Defining the problem
Etsy provides a place for makers to sell their goods and reach a large audience. There are many talented individuals who are specially skilled in certain areas. Customers can search for the items they’re looking for, but sometimes they want to customize those items to suit their personal tastes. While there are currently ways for customers to communicate their customizations with sellers via messaging, Etsy would like to create features that easily identify sellers who take requests for customizations and also allow those same sellers to easily take requests.
Interviewing Users
We set out to interview 8 users , 4 being buyers and 4 being sellers. We wanted to get an inside look and what people were using Etsy for and how we can help improve their process. We set up two separate screeners and interview questions for buyers on Etsy as well as for sellers on Etsy. We realized we had to split it up in a way that would change customization for both parties. Here are some of the main points we wanted to focus on.
Past Etsy experiences
Customization within Etsy right now
How users would like for customization to change
Some of the reasons that users use Etsy
The transaction that goes on from buyer to seller
The selection process of searching for an item
Synthesis
Affinity Mapping is a term used within UX design that means gathering what you’ve learned from user interviews and creating groups and themes within the information. We wrote each thought on a post it note and separated the post it notes by color for each the buyer and seller.
Themes
Communication
Device
Business
Orders
Sign up
Items/listings
Persona
Creating personas is a technique used to designate a target user. After conducting user research there are major themes that are created. Through these themes and characteristics my team has created 2 personas. These personas have the characters, goals and needs that all of our users have. Personas was such a large help in the overall aspect of things because it really makes the designer design for a specific person. It is easier to categorize each goal and need that should be included because you know who you are designing for.
Ideation & Design Phase
Design Studio
Design studio is a tool utilized throughout UX design that forms when a team gets together and has a designated time to create screens that they think will solve the users problems. We did 3 design studios and came up with multiple conclusions. Having to do this at a fast pace makes you think of random ideas that would never come to mind if you really sat there and thought it through. Some of my best designs came through design studio and we ended up utilizing some of those designs with our ending prototype.
Feature Prioritization
After our design studio we created a feature list, which is a list of all the features that can be associated with the Etsy app. Coming up with all types of features was not that difficult because we had done so much research into what users wanted and needed where we had so many different ideas to integrate. From there, we prioritized our features into 4 sections labeled ‘must have’ ‘should have’ ‘could have’ and ‘won’t have’. This is called a MoSCoW Matrix. We used the features in the ‘must’ and ‘should’ sections the most. Some of these features included a menu, a purchase process, viewing item photos and ability to customize. That last one was the main focus of our entire project. Creating an easy and efficient way to make customizations to an item was not an easy task. It took us hours to figure out what the best solution would be and through tons of testing we finally started to get somewhere.
Design & Usability Testing
While ideating our designs, we realized that we essentially had two separate users navigating this platform, sellers and shoppers. Therefore, we came up with 2 prototypes. The following wireframes are split up into the "seller's" journey and the "shopper's" journey.
SELLER JOURNEY
SHOPPER JOURNEY
KPI RESULTS
3 Rounds | 5 Users
Round 1: average user satisfaction rating - 2.5/5
Round 2: average user satisfaction rating - 2.8/5
Round 3: average user satisfaction rating - 3.5/5
NEXT STEPS
Increase amount of usability tests
Build out other page options for functionality
Pitch feature integration to Etsy