Staying connected, with a
Common ground
Time frame:
1-week of Research and UX artifacts
1 week of wireframing/mockups/testing
1-week iteration/design lockup/final testing
Roles:
UI Lead
Interviewer
UX Researcher
Tools:
Figma
Google Survey
Figjam
Mentor:
Sean K. Keating
Project Overview
SNKRS is an app that is an eCommerce website that provides customers insider access to the latest launches, hottest events, and exclusive releases that NIKE has to offer. This project aimed to design a new feature for customers to discuss and share their love for sneakers cultivating a sense of community within the app.
I have prompted the role UI Lead, creating SNKRS style guide, ensuring the design met the standards of our style guide, developing questions for our interviews, interviewing people, and conducting secondary research.
Challenges
The brief of the project was to create a forum feature to encourage customers to engage in the discussion sharing anything sneaker related empowering themselves through the community.
As a former sneakerhead myself, I noticed a lack of community when the traditional method of standing in line for a pair of sneakers had transitioned to a digital-first platform, direct-to-consumer (D2C) company. This caused a strain in the community because rather than a fair process of first-come-first-serve, attaining sneakers was based on a lottery system.
Therefore, I decided to help repair this disjointed method by creating a sense of community while remedying the lotto system raffle.
Why?
When people think of sneakerheads what comes to mind is a group of people that just have closets full of sneakers that hardly even wear them, but in reality, it is much more than that: It was about embracing and owning the culture that surrounds them while also being about wearing something that shows off individuality and is a form of expression.
The ultimate goal was to understand the many perspectives within the community to help us create something that will band them together.
Next Steps…
To understand the sneakerhead community as a whole, we started off with this approach
Understand the sneaker community as of right now
Research other websites that are eCommerce fashion-based
Look at apps with forum features
What distinguishes a good forum from a bad one
Understand the current experience within the app
Discover the goals, needs, motivations & frustrations of potential users
Research/ Empathize
Primary Research
In order to really understand our crowd, we conducted multiple interviews with people who have their foot in the community. I conducted some face-to-face interviews while using a questionnaire that my teammate and I helped put together to really get insight. My teammates created an online survey to get basic information and we sent it through a discord channel for any sneakerhead to complete.
Secondary Research
We used a lot of secondary research in order to flush out what works in a forum and what doesn’t. Taking a look at other competitors such as GOAT and Stock X we wanted to take into consideration how they displayed their flow and dissect the placement of their elements and how we could improve it.
Research synthesis
Key Insights:
Most people that are sneakerheads are getting information and community engagement through discord, Reddit, and Twitter
Key Insights:
Why collect shoes?
It was more about the shoes itself, it was about the story behind them. Whether you had to stand in line at the break of dawn for hours to cop them or the reason the designer created the shoes. That was the purpose of having them
How was the transition into an eCommerce platform?
There were frequent meetups before the digital age took over. Now, with the power of technology, everything is about the tip of your thumb and there was no need to stand in line.
It is near impossible to grab a pair of shoes off the SNKRS app because it is based on a lotto system
There are automated bots and resellers who are only a part of this culture on the basis of making money
Define/characterize
“How might we increase engagement and build community in the Nike SNKRS app?”
We marched forward with this question to help guide our decision making
User Interview
I developed a hypothetical persona to gain a basis for who I would conduct user interviews. In order to learn about the real experiences people have with sneakers, I prepared a quick activity to run with participants who matched the persona.
I focused on asking open-ended questions and focused individual's perspective and their experiences & relationship with sneaker culture.
User Persona
I created this persona to help us with our next steps in designing our newly added feature
What do you do?
After finding out Chico was having a hard time transitioning into the digital age of sneaker culture we mapped out a hypothetical experience of his approach of procuring a pair of shoes from the SNKRS app.
After conducting our interviews it has been apparent that there were other challenges that arose. We felt that by solving these pain points we could create a well-functioning design based on our Sneakerhead’s needs. We developed our how might we statements to accommodate.
“How might we get people to use our forum feature considering there are other forums that have such a big following?”
“How might we encourage current and new-coming SNKRS users to participate in our shoe drop without feeling like it’s impossible to attain shoes?
Create/Ideate
Information Architecture
I created a information architecture to help us define a blueprint simplifying our design decision making.
Task flow
Using a task flow my teammates created we were able to figure out the most optimal way to complete a task and model our mid-fidelity wireframes after.
Wireframes
My team-mates went through and created many ideations of how our flow would look like. This process would ultimately help us fine-tune our flow overall create a better experience for our users.
Style Guide
Before we started any final fidelity designs, I created a style guide to ensure consistency throughout the whole product. Since there wasn’t a style guide online I went through an dissected each element through the current SNKRS app already had. I felt like keeping the existing tone felt just right because the problem wasn’t the typography or color palette. I used a lot of influence from existing forum apps to help guide my decision in creating something that would stand out and truly be an enjoyable experience.
Final/Prototype
Posting an outfit of the day
As we were conducting our research we felt like it was best to have some fun interactions with our community so we created a separate tab for photos to show off your sneakers and how you style them. We thought this would encourage some of our audience to gain inspiration and give out inspiration creating a tight-knit community.
Engagement within message threads
Not only can you post your pictures, we also added a feature where you can create your own topic and spark a new conversation surrounding sneakers, sneaker culture, and anything you want.
Lotto System
We’ve taken note that it is difficult to procure a pair of shoes through the lotto system so we incorporated a new feature that will increase your chances of winning the next hottest drop. By engaging more in our forum feature you will be awarded points and with those points, you can use and spend it on a pair of shoes that you’ve been waiting to release.
Conclusion/Reflection
While working through this complex problem we always had to take it back to our goal, which was encouraging engagement through our app. By keeping this solution on the back of our minds we were able to create solutions for a problem that we thought was a massive task.
Takeaway 1
Talking to our interviewees really helped us establish a connection with them. Not only did we build rapport and understand their perspective we were able to find out different ways we can improve our newly added feature. Not only that, but we were also able to find out how we can fix the current lotto system that SNKRS currently had.
Takeaway 2
Knowing that whatever you start off with isn’t going to stay the same. In fact, the brief will continue to evolve and develop the more insight you gain from going through a methodical process to resolve a problem.