Discovery & The Design Problem

Now that you have a better understanding of each phase of the UI/UX process, I’m going to walk you through step-by-step how to create an e-commerce application from scratch, starting with the discovery phase.

Discovery

In this discovery, I am focusing on the following problem as my problem hypothesis:

“I believe that small business owners have suffered during the pandemic, are getting their profits eaten alive by larger corporations with direct access to customers, and I think they would benefit greatly from having a system where customers, businesses, and couriers can connect locally to create value through commerce.”

That being my problem hypothesis, the next thing I need to do is research to see if it’s actually a problem. With the pandemic still raging, I will turn to one of my absolute favorite methods of discovery research: digital ethnography.

The nice part about this approach is that you’re almost completely removing the Hawthorne effect, along with other cognitive biases, and users are much more likely to be honest if they can retain a higher degree of anonymity that the internet provides.

Let’s see if this is actually a problem. I’m going to search for small business problems during the pandemic on Reddit, blogs, and other social media sites and see what real users are actually saying.

Actual user quotes:

“We’re having a problem with shipping however, because even when using Shippo, Shipstation, PirateShip, etc (we’ve tried probably ten of them), shipping costs are still often more than a bottle of sauce. We’re seeing tons of people add to cart and get to the checkout only to abandon the cart when they see the shipping cost. Does anyone have any other shipping solutions that could help with this? Thanks for any input!”

“Even my dad’s frequent amazon prime deliveries have been arriving late lately and he comes to me in a huff complaining about it. I wish people at least understood that being angry at the seller does absolutely nothing because they’re not the post lol, do they expect you to hand deliver it yourself?”

“Single products are light but very bulky (it is cardboard shipped collapsed). Single products selling price range from $12 to $135 and orders are shipped in custom made boxes sized 48x40x7 or 40x40x7 to protect items. This makes it that orders need to have a minimum of 5–10 products to fill in a box and make sense out of the shipping price. Most of my deliveries are residential.”

People just like the feeling of getting something for free, or getting a discount. Doesn’t matter if it is a trick. Just raise the price and offer free shipping!

People are so used to Amazon Prime delivery dates. Etsy sellers just can’t live up to that expectation. I know I struggled with that back in March when Covid started. No matter how nice and polite you are about it, sometimes they simply won’t listen.

As you can see, through the plurality of data, we’re noticing a pattern:

• Small businesses are, in fact, suffering due to the pandemic.
• They’re having a hard time competing with larger, more established businesses that have access to more advanced shipping operations.
• Most of these businesses are B2C and not B2B
• Customers are mad about shipping delays and supply-chain disruptions.
• Many small business owners feel like they need some sort of competitive advantage in the marketplace that they just don’t have.

Some of the best, richest data that you’ll ever get comes from user quotes that are said on the internet for two reasons:

1. Most of the time, if your users are complaining,
   they have no reason to lie, and
2. Most of the time, if your users are anonymous,
   they have no reason to hold back.

You’re not dealing with the cognitive biases of attempting to get a user to explain their behaviors. You’re able to see the what’s and how’s very directly and honestly, straight from them, without them being influenced either way by your presence as an interviewer (which users always are).

Based on the research, our competition in this case would be products like Walmart+, Facebook Marketplace, Craigslist, and many of the other listing/classified selling applications on the market.

How can we get around this? By providing not just a service for one user type or another, but acting as a nexus for many of them.

Our strategy here will be to:

• Appeal to local businesses by helping them connect with their customers on a centralized, curated digital platform.
• Appeal to local customers by helping them get exactly what they want even with supply chain disruptions, on the same day as they ordered if at all possible.
• Appeal to couriers and local delivery service professionals by offering them an avenue to make money, and incentivizing the local transport of goods that would otherwise just stay on shelves.

These will make up our work roles for our application:

• Small business accounts
• Customer accounts
• Courier accounts
• Administrative accounts

Now let’s talk about business goals.

For our business goals, we know that it’s going to cost roughly $350k to get this thing designed, developed, launched, and revised in the first year, so we’ll need to plan for that and calculate break-even threshold and tolerances.

Generally I like to do it like this:

• Total expenditures + 25% or higher = Aim for gross ROI
• Total expenditures — 25% or lower = Need to discuss pivoting

Any number between those numbers may call for persevering in your efforts to get your product to connect with your target users.

In this case: $437,500 is what we’re looking for in gross ROI within the first year AFTER launch.

and any number beneath $297,500 for gross revenue indicates that we’ll need to discuss pivoting because we’re missing the mark.

Why these formulas? Because it gives you a good spread and good business direction within reasonable tolerances. Be sure to talk with your stakeholders and accounting to make sure in case they have additional factors that need to be accounted for, or other tolerances that they want to use.

Out in the real world, you are going to encounter some absolutely crazy BS when you launch a product. It is then IMPERATIVE that you account for what will happen if you miss, hit, or exceed your necessary metrics as your product gets it’s foothold in your market sector.

So, we know our business goals:

• Expand brand recognition & positive association of our organization with this application, as a provider of service to local communities.
• Acquire user base of at least 10,000 users within 16 months of launch.
• Meet or exceed minimum net ROI projections with 18 months of launch.
• In this case: $437,500 is what we’re looking for in gross ROI within the first year AFTER launch.
• Any number beneath $297,500 for gross revenue indicates that we’ll need to discuss pivoting because we’re missing the mark.

We know our user’s goals for each type of user:

→ For local businesses

• Sell directly to customers quickly and conveniently.
• Outmaneuver large-scale competition.
• Increase brand recognition for local businesses.

→ For local customers

• Buy quickly and conveniently from local businesses.
• Get shipping faster than they can get on Amazon.
• Have freedom to order what they want when they want it.
• Feel good about ordering locally while getting their needs met.

→ For local couriers

• To make money quickly and efficiently
• Minimal contact with both businesses and customers
• Freedom to work however many hours they want

→ For administrators

• To create, read, update, and delete all information associated with any other account type.
• Note: administrators cannot see sensitive personal information including credit card numbers, private location data (for customers and couriers), and/or additional private data that does not aid in their administrative function.

Now, how do we know that they’re interested, and willing to spend money to solve this problem? We smoke test our offer against our real, target users.

Smoke testing our idea

In this mini-design phase, we will be putting together a few fake screens of our product idea, explaining how it should work, the benefits our users can expect, and then asking them directly to sign up or buy now.

What we are trying to gauge here is two things:

1. Are people interested?
2. Are they interested enough to make a purchase?

This serves to tell us if our product idea holds water, if there is good product-market fit, and if there is real commercial viability.

If you cannot achieve at least a 3–5% conversion rate from smoke testing DO NOT MOVE ONTO THE DESIGN PHASE!!!

Why? Because if people aren’t converting during the smoke test, it means that either:

• You don’t really understand their problem
• Your messaging isn’t reaching them
• You aren’t clearly articulating your product’s value to them
• They don’t give a shit about your solution because it’s not a legitimate problem for them, or
• It’s not a big enough problem for them to justify a purchase at the price-point you are shooting for.

Let me be clear right now: where there is great pain, there is great product potential.

So how do you perform a smoke test for your product idea? Watch these videos. They’re short and you will learn a lot very quickly.

Did you watch them all? Good.

These are short videos but the reason I put SO MUCH EMPHASIS on smoke testing is because you NEVER KNOW how your market will respond to your stakeholder’s product idea if you don’t test.

I will ALSO tell you from experience that if your company and stakeholders spend a boatload of money developing a product that doesn’t land with their target market, they’re going to be looking for someone to blame, and that someone is almost always the UI/UXer in charge of the project.

Don’t let this happen to you. Thoroughly smoke test your product idea, and validate it with your target users so that you know for a fact that there is market interest and commercial viability before you move fully into the design phase.

Once we’ve gotten our numbers back from our smoke test, they are at least 3% for overall conversions, we’ve talked with our team, execs, and stakeholders, and gotten the green-light; we can move onto the next phase: design.