Smart Shop App is one of the interesting Startup projects that I had a chance to collaborate with; Smart Shop is a B2C platform to help small shops all around the city efficiently sell their products.

I was involved in the project from the very beginning. It was a great experience working with the team directly, defining the project roadmap, and doing all the workshops, from defining the problem to implementing the final project.

So, where does the idea come from?

It is clear to us that Portugal is a tourist destination for so many people all around the world. Besides, many local shops in every part of the cities offer excellent products at the best prices that nobody will know about. Because these local shops are usually small, they can not afford to do marketing properly to attract potential customers.

With this in mind, we want to provide a platform for e-shoppers to find any premium products in every part of the city and buy many products from different stores simultaneously.

In order to improve the understanding of the stakeholders about the user’s needs and the project’s directions, as well as the team involved in the development (designers, developers, and so on), I decided to use Lean UX canvas, a tool to state the problem a more visual and interactive way.

To define the Business Problem, we have to think holistically for both sides to create something valuable. We should answer the question: What kind of business have we identified that needs help?

The Smart Shop UX canvas

To answer that, we should consider the business outcomes (changes in customer behavior). We had to ask: What changes in customer behavior will indicate that we have solved a real problem in a way that adds value to our customers?

After clearly understanding this phase, I start to fill out the business model canvas and the value proposition canvas.

Inquisitiveness and an Open Mind

An essential quality of our job has a keen eye for improvement. Where others put up with problems, we, as designers, should fix them. We should look for the poor experiences, however subtle, that have long been accepted as the norm. We wanted to optimize the flow both on the customer and on the shop owners’ side.

To achieve that, we were willing to exert a lot of energy to learn from both sides of our users; our goal was to discover, experiment, question the assumptions, and consider the obvious.

The Smart Shop user journey map

in order to understand the user behavior in important touchpoints of the customer side app, I created a user journey map in the middle of the process.
A user journey isn’t straightforward from point A to point B. It is more complicated. The first thing we needed to do was to collect data from our own customers based on the persona we defined at the early stage of the process.

The main goal was not just to identify the pain points of customers but also to maximize customer satisfaction.
Since user journey maps divide the action process into specific stages to serve the customers better, it has many benefits for us and our stakeholders.

The result of the user journey map was amazing:

we found great opportunities to improve some of the important touchpoints as follows:

• Better organizing the product listing
• Improving the visual hierarchy of the product details
• improving the payments process
• improving the discoverability of the discounted product
• adding intuitive notifications for shop owners
• investigating the opportunity to negotiate with 3rd party delivery system

Design  language

Visual inconsistencies can be easy to detect in digital products.
As designers, we need to ensure we are not using different design languages to describe the same task, which can lead to confusion.

There are many ways to start building design systems. One of the best ways is to start with the elements that will most improve the user experience of our product.

To find the most significant impact, we can consider the following goals:
Identify workflow pain points and opportunities; for example, as a user moves through a workflow, is there a similar concept described differently?
Secondly, does the product looks like it has a unified design language?

Furthermore, for evaluating the design language, it is always good to ask: Do all of our brand elements currently hold together to tell one story?
By asking these questions, we wanted to understand the quality and quantity of our design language.

Style Guides

Typography

Customer side app design

Build, Measure, Learn, and Iterate

In the first iteration, after the initial idea has been selected, the team focused on making that idea a reality. The goal at this point was not to sell the idea and make a profit right away because chances were that the product was not fully serving customer needs yet.

Therefore, we as designers need to embrace that uncertainty. Because through iteration, we can get closer and closer to creating a good product that fits our customers’ needs.
Build-Measure-Learn is a vital process in Lean startup product development. So as we are working on the product, we use this method for the startup team by combining hypothesis-driven experimentation’s iterative product changes with validated learning from real users and customers.

The core benefit of using the Lean method is that it shortens the time to produce an MVP and that a product fits an elusive place in the market.

So at this point, our journey has just started, and we will embrace the iterative process of building, measuring, and learning. We will make adjustments or even pivot altogether by measuring customers’ and users’ reactions and behaviors against the MVP in this journey.