Crowd-sourced Delivery App

Tags: User research, webdesign, UX design

Date: June 2019 - Aug 2019

Duration: 8 weeks

The start-up company dspatch is building a crowdsourced delivery app that allows users to transport goods for each other in Sweden. Back in the summer of 2019, the company had just started working with the product and had not yet done research into competitors or users. I was brought in as a UX-Intern, a role in which I formed the product idea into something that was related to real-world problems for potential users. Activities included:

Fästpunkt 1

Research

I started my internship doing design research. I first collected designs of similar solutions, which allowed dspatch to see what paths they could take regarding their product.

Images and insights of various designs were presented to the dspatch team

I also made sure to gather insights about the potential users of the app. As the company had not yet defined a target group, I created a lean canvas in a workshop with the team. The canvas gave us an idea of who would use the product, what problem it would solve for these users, and what unique value proposition dspatch would have in relation to competitors.

To find out if the target group actually experienced the problem described on the lean canvas, I reached out to people within that target group. I held interviews with those people regarding their prior experiences with transportation services. I wanted to find out why they sent packages, what they liked, what they didn't like, and what made them choose one delivery alternative over the other. Through their answers, I could see if the described problems were real, and if the value proposition was interesting enough to attract users.

When the interviews had been held, I summarized my insights and presented them to the team. The canvas and the product idea could then be reformulated so that it better matched what we had learned about the users.

Fästpunkt 2

Wireframes

With a better idea for what the product would do, the team now wanted a visual understanding of what the user flow could look like when placing a delivery request. To get such an understanding, I created a couple of wireframes were I put my focus on what information should go where, and what flow the user would go through. The wireframes were a starting point for the team so that they had something to look at, discuss, and move forward with.

A couple of snapshots from the created wireframes, showing a delivery request flow

Fästpunkt 3

Landing page

To better understand what would attract users to the product, I created a landing page. The landing page would communicate what the product was and why it would be used. In iterations, a draft was build in sketch and then shown to potential users who were asked to explain what they thought the product was about and why someone would use it. They were also asked if they themselves would be interested in using the product, and why.

Different versions of the landing page was created and tested

By iterating the landing page with users I learned:

What text, images, and layout best helped in communicating what the dspatch app would do and why you would use it
What problems/values the users most strongly identified with, and that therefore got them the most exciting about the product

The landing page was iterated until most users I asked could understand it and showed an interest in the presented product. The final landing page was used as a basis for building the website.

Fästpunkt 4

Website

The last weeks of my internship were spent on creating the dspatch website. The layout, text, and icons used were based on insights from the landing page. The website was also built in iterations where I asked for external feedback before making a new version. The aim of the website was to (A) attract investors by showing the product idea and (B) to get potential users interested and make them sign up on a mailing list for more information in the future. A catched version of the website can be found here.

Website start page

Website: why use dspatch

Lessons Learned

To work as a UX-designer in a cross-functional start-up team was a new experience for me. The internship, therefore, presented plenty of challenges to overcome. Overcoming these challenges resulted in new lessons. 3 things I learned during the internship were:

How to work with non-designers in a cross-functional team, and be an advocate for listening to users and build a product based on their needs.
How to work quickly and iteratively with web-design, and utilize user feedback to make sure that the design properly communicates what it should and creates excitement.
What it's like to work in a fuzzy start-up environment where it is not clear what you should do, and how to apply theoretical UX design knowledge to set up relevant goals in such an environment.