Design Opportunity

Creating a considered omnichannel experience for small business owners who wish to sell their products on various social media channels such as Facebook and Instagram.

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UX Process

Keeping the end-users at the center of our design process, we worked closely with Square’s Product Team for a period of 4 months (16 weeks) to create an innovative solution that was tailored to the user’s needs.

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User Research

Identifying Users

With a clear understanding of our problem space, we soon discovered that even though our goal was to empower small business owners, there was another set of user group which we had to take into consideration, namely, their end customers. Hence, our design space had to take into consideration both these user groups - Merchants and their end Customers.

Interviewing Merchants

Once the two groups of users were identified, we started with the recruitment of participants for our study. For this, we approached several business owners who were willing to share the stories behind starting and running their business with us. We recruited 8 merchants who owned a variety of businesses, including jewelry, grooming, dairy, food, and stationery products. Our objective was to identify their general business practices and know their opinions on online business. A list of sample questions that we asked them during the interview is included below.

• What motivated you to start selling your products online?

• How do customers place an order through your online store?

• How do you manage your inventory, delivery logistics and sales of your business?

• What motivated you to have your online business present on multiple channels?

• What online channel, if any, do you prefer the most to sell your products?

• What are some of the pain points, if any, that you face when selling products online?

Surveying Customers

While interviewing the merchants provided us with helpful insights, we also had to learn about the buying experiences of their customers. Since we wanted to reach out to a wider group of users, we published a survey that would help us collect quantitative data. Through these responses, we wanted to learn about the behavior of customers regarding their online shopping practices and preferences. A list of sample questions from the survey is included below.

• What do you do most often when it comes to shopping?

  
• In your experience, how does online shopping compare to in-store shopping?

  

• Have you ever contacted a store through Instagram, Facebook, etc to get more information on a product?

  

Competitor Analysis

Doing competitor analysis allowed us to understand existing online business solutions. It allowed us to get into the shoes of merchants who have experiences with these platforms and understand the merits and demerits of each from their perspective. For instance, Facebook store provides merchants with different page templates that best suits their business. Instagram, on the other hand, allows only verified businesses to sell their products online through their app.

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Research Analysis

Affinity Mapping

With the information that we gathered through our research methods, we conducted an affinity mapping session to identify recurring pain points and develop design ideas.

User Needs & Pain Points

By mapping the affinity diagram, we identified the following paint-points and the needs of the merchants and the customers.

Design Implications

Understanding the needs and the existing pain points from the merchants and the customers gave us a good idea of the problems that our design solution should tackle. We analyzed the findings and came up with the following design implications.

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Design

Divergent Design Ideas

Translating our research findings to design, we brainstormed ideas that focused on communication between merchants and customers as interacting with customers formed an essential part of their business. We decided to focus on the messaging aspect of selling products on social media and leveraging the power of messaging by making it interactive. We created three divergent design ideas and listed out the strengths and weaknesses of each.

We proposed these design ideas to our business partner, Square. They were on board with the idea of focusing on the interactive messaging idea but suggested us to introduce chatbots in interactive messaging to take it even one more step further. This idea immediately clicked with us as now we had the means to completely automate the interaction with the customers that also made inventory and order management an easier task for the merchant.

Model Design

Having a clearer idea of what we wanted to design, we designed this model that explains how our design solution will fit in the business space and what changes this will bring to existing business practices.

We designed a new app, Square for Business, that helps merchants run and manage their growing business across multiple channels.

This app is only merchant facing and hence it does not interfere with the shopping experience of the customers. The customers still shop through their preferred channel with the only difference being that the messages are now interactive which is useful for inventory and order management.

Merchant Facing Design

For the merchant side, I designed the high-fidelity prototype of the Square for Business app. This new app enables the merchant to post products on multiple social media and messaging channels, manage product inventory and keep track of customer orders. In addition to this, our design solution allows merchants to keep track of their overall business goals.

• Create Product

  

• Store - Products
  Inventory Management

  

• Store - Customers
  Order Management

  

Customer Facing Design

For the customer side, I designed a high-fidelity prototype that depicts the experience of a customer with interactive messaging when purchasing through social media platforms. The customer side of interaction has a linear flow - from browsing products, placing an order to viewing order details. This interactive messaging service can be implemented on any channel that supports direct messaging. We imagined what it would look like for a customer on Instagram.

• Browse Products

  

• Interactive Messages

  

• Enter Details

  

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Evaluation

To evaluate the merchant-facing design, we conducted cognitive walkthroughs with users who also evaluated the prototype through the System Usability Scale (SUS) tool. We recruited 6 participants who represented our user group and 3 other participants who were industry experts. The SUS consisted of a 10 item questionnaire with five response options; from Strongly agree to Strongly disagree. Indicated below are the final scores that we obtained from the users and participants.

A SUS score above 68 is considered above average and a SUS score above 80 is considered excellent in form and performance. Furthermore, we carried out Heuristic Evaluation with 3 experts from various business units within Square who were highly knowledgeable in usability principles. During this evaluation, issues were identified and each issue was rated on their severity ranging from 0 to 4, with 0 being very low severity and 4 being very high severity. Some of the major issues that were highlighted during the evaluation session are as follows.

• Channel selection at multiple stages of the flow was confusing

• Provide a method to use inventory from the existing Square Marketplace app

• Contacting seller on Instagram did not seem intuitive for customers

Based on the feedback that we received, I designed the second iteration for both the merchant-facing and the customer-facing design before presenting our final deliverables to the product managers at Square.

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Take Away

Overall, I was very satisfied with the way this project turned out. We went above and beyond for coming up with a solution that works not only for the merchants but also their customers. Our design solution addresses the problem given to us while keeping the constraints given by Square into consideration. While the customer-facing solution seems to be difficult to implement in the real world at the moment, it is only a matter of time before interactive messaging becomes a commonplace feature on these platforms.