Depop New

Timeline

Feb - Mar 2020

Context

Team Project, Stanford Product Design Class

Contribution

Visual System, Interface Design, Interaction Design

Project Overview

Depop is a peer-to-peer social shopping app where users can sell their clothes & other items from their profiles. In a Stanford class focused on human factors in design, we were prompted to select a simple interactive system within an app or website. My group decided to take a close look at Depop, specifically the system of listing an item for sale. I had used this app a few times and became interested in this new model of e-commerce as someone who wants to contribute to a more sustainable fashion industry.

01 Design Challenge

How can we address usability issues within Depop’s selling feature?

02 Defining...

System

The “SELL” function: users add descriptive information and media about their item.

User

Someone who would like to sell an item to other people.

Tasks

add photo / video of item, add descriptive elements, add billing / shipping info

03 Task Analysis

We recruited six first-time users of the app, all college students. We asked them to:

Create an account
Post an item to their shop
Seek out a specific item to purchase

We observed users as they moved through these three systems and concluded with an interview about their experience.

04 Usability Issues

We created diagrams that broke these tasks down. Combining these with insights from the interview, we found some problems with the current process:

Steps are jumbled together
The interface is visually cluttered

For users without experience selling their clothing, these issues made the process overwhelming.

05 Creating a Task Flow

Concept A

Concept B

Differentiating tasks through individual action screens

Use visual signifiers and contrast to differentiate tasks

06 Low-Fi Paper Prototype

+ Heuristic Evaluation

We conducted usability testing with classmates who examined it for violations of Nielsen’s Usability Heuristics. On the left: flow for adding descriptive elements.

07 Storyboarding

Drawn on my iPad; combines Concepts A & B from above.

08 Medium-Fi Prototype

We used Figma to prototype key interactions. On the left is part of the prototype, what the users would see when uploading pictures.

09 User Testing

In this round of testing, we focused on users with little to no experience selling items online. We spoke to three 21 year-old college students:

Naya

Maggie

Emily

We asked users to make a post listing a pair of sneakers for sale. We took videos and screen recordings, then conducted a short interview and a structured survey about their experiences.

10 Final Prototype (Figma)

Due to factors around the 2020 pandemic, we were not able to implement a final iteration as a team. I decided to take user feedback and channel it into one last version of our prototype. (Full-screen viewing is recommended.)