So nowadays everyone’s shopping right? Oh sorry, people are shopping for centuries actually what I meant to say is that everyone’s shopping online. And the trend is increasing day by day.

Sharp Cart is a multi-theme eCommerce builder to help businesses grow online by providing a number of elegant iOS, android & website themes. The platform provides everything a business needs to build an eCommerce website to sell, software tools to manage, and mobile apps to bring your products to the people. Also providing customized solutions for different categories of businesses according to their needs. By starting we first focused on a basic but also finished MVP.

⚡️ Story

Choosing the right eCommerce solutions is extremely important for business development. The vision was pretty clear to create a product that is usable, understandable, accessible, and user-centric like a perfect eCommerce solution for multiple platforms so that any type of business can adapt easily to make things online. It was not just a simple eCommerce product to design the experience but a customized solution of multiple themes with almost the same data for multiple platforms. The most important requirement was to focus on the end-user(shopper) & to provide them a solution that they can say yay with happiness. As it is a long-term project we will be taking it step by step.

🔍 Focus & Solution

The eCommerce market today is very wide and competitive. Now, eCommerce is evolving or better say evolved into digital commerce that implies the entire business journey from buying to delivery with an online experience. As I said before this is a long terms project with many themes and different platforms. Throughout the journey of this product, we will be focusing on some universal user-centric points.

The HMW are.

1. The shopper should be able to easily navigate through the app or website.
2. Simple & universal approaches to locate and complete the shopping experience.
3. Modern & minimal design experience.
4. Clean & seamless checkout to improve user(shopper) experience.
5. Customization made it easy to change the App/Website experience according to the business needs.
6. As the eCommerce industry is growing day by day we should keep the competition in mind.
7. The product should be memorable & accessible.
8. Make the management easy for businesses for both app & website.

🕶 My Role

Well, my job is simple as I will be taking the project from start to finish doing researches, data architecture, analyzing the inputs & outputs, brainstorming, focus groups, and many more needed.

🎬 Kickoff

As most of the idea was clear about the requirements because it’s eCommerce and most requirements are simple and Infront of us. Like from the products we are using daily.

But here our focus was to discover a solution that can make the online experience smooth as well as makes it easy for businesses to deal with customers’ shopping experience with the best approaches and run their business along with proving the best experience to their particular users.

Why businesses are coming online?

1. The most important factor is that most people nowadays shop online.
2. In 2020, a total of over 80 % of consumers across the globe shopped online.
3. The main reason is most people don’t have time to go to stores and buy things that they need or the things they need often are available In those stores that are far away from them which costs them more time and money.
4. So through online platforms businesses connect with their users and provide the best products with the best facilities and offers.

🧐 Understanding/Research

Desk Research

Before connecting with any of users or businesses first I conducted my own research by studying famous online platforms like Amazon, eBay, Ali Baba, Noon, Daraz, etc.

Which gave me a proper idea of the flow and I pointed out some gain & pain points. As it will be a universal product for different kinds of businesses so I studied a lot more in different categories. Which gave me a lot of questions for the next steps, like

1. What are the products that a person buys online?
2. What attracts a person about the product online that he/she wants to buy?
3. What does a person prefer, online or onsite shopping?
4. What does a person like most about online shopping?
5. What is a person’s great & worst experience while shopping online on any platform?
6. What does a person use mostly, cash on delivery or credit card (or any other method, like a wallet)?

And many more questions like these helped me understand the shoppers & businesses better.

Conducting some user & business interviews

Finding users for this interview was easy because at least 70% of my friends shop online which made my process a lot easier. I conducted some interviews with almost the same questions for each. Which gave me insights about what they are happy & frustrated about in shopping online through an App or a Website. Although it took us some time to find businesses that can share their online business running experience with us gladly we found some and it was worth the efforts.

Below are some points about users’ & businesses’ frustrations & happiness about online shopping.

Users are frustrated.

1. Too few mediums to contact the product company.
2. Incorrect & congested product information.
3. Not enough choices in terms of payments.
4. Too many promotional ads everywhere.
5. Registration process.
6. Poor search and filter options like Page refresh every time a user clicks a filter or tab.
7. Some product lists are way too long or endless scroll.
8. No multiple shipping addresses in their favorite shopping app/website.
9. Out-of-stock items are still present in searches.
10. Coupons do not apply to orders.
11. Long checkout process.

Users are happy.

1. The convenience of online shopping. Customers can purchase items from the comfort of their own homes or workplace.
2. Different types of offers and discounts.
3. Fewer efforts & saves money.
4. No pressure shopping.
5. Comparisons.
6. Tracking the delivery.
7. Easy to find different products.
8. Understanding product quality from product reviews and photos.

Businesses are frustrated.

1. Lack of flexibility.
2. No reports or insights online about their businesses.
3. Not being able to solve their user’s frustrations with ease.
4. No support system.
5. Not being able to navigate easily through the product to find something.
6. Cannot handle fake reviews.
7. No personalization for their business.
8. Frustrated with paperwork, documents, etc.

Businesses are happy.

1. Easy to advertise & showcase trending and new products with fewer efforts and costs.
2. They get a variety of reviews from every kind of user which helps them make some changes for the benefit of their users and business.
3. Anytime access, 24 hours a day, 7 days a week.
4. No paperwork, everything online.
5. Provide support to their users.
6. Low Operating Costs
7. Reach a global audience
8. Can market it easily with social media.
9. Newsletters.

📝 Analyze

Personas

Based on the previous activities, I designed two personas which we used throughout the process and will use in the next phases. This helped us understand the gain and pain points of the user logically and emotionally.

Empathy Map

This graphical representation helps us understand our users and their needs deeper. It helps us empathize with users and draw out unexpected insights about their needs. Like doing a specific task what they say, what they think, what they do, and what they feel.

Brainstorming

It can be easily said that brainstorming is usable in almost every situation to collect and gain some more perspective and ideas, and that is exactly what we did by pointing out some basic universal solutions and comparing them for a better user experience.

Information Architecture

One of many ways to show the structural flow of the product is Information Architecture which helps us understand the flow throughout the whole process ahead like, in design, development, test, etc. it’s one of the most used methods in the UX process.

💪🏻 Creating Experience (Design)

And here is the phase which everyone enjoys because this gives us something actual to look at, test, and iterate. Which makes every face smile involved in the product even the client.

By starting with some rough sketches.

Results

👉🏻 Test v1, Deploy & Test again

After successfully creating a design experience now it’s time to test it. We test it on the basis of all questions we had previously and some new ones too, some minor changes occurred.

By making some changes we set it to development in which I was pretty much involved with the D team to help them understand the flow and test it while they develop it and at last complete modules testing & moving on to the next theme.