To better understand the audience I conducted an in depth interview with the client.

What are their lifestyles, values, influences, outlooks on life?
What do they want from this product?
What is their preferred form of content?
What types of jobs do they work?
Their age, education, area?

From interviewing the client I was able to determine a profile for the target audience and better understand the lives they live.

I learned this audience is influenced predominantly from social media.They pay attention to what they see posted on Instagram, Youtube, blogs, Tik Tok, Pinterest and Facebook. They shop from Etsy and Society 6 but it has frictions. To them, this product is an opportunity for social validation, to feel cool. The users get gratification from supporting a local artist, while also getting the benefit of owning unique authentic items, to wear to work, or display in their homes.

After learning about who the audience is, I wanted to take a look at their existing mental models. I conducted a formative research study looking at the platforms that influence these users. The results from this study would allow me to find inspiration, and make better design decisions throughout the process.

Instagram has a very minimalist shop layout that is intuitive to interact with.
This similar style of layout is also seen on other popular shopping apps, such as Zara, Anthropologie, and Etsy.

Zara and Instagram both use a bookmark icon to save images. Its simplicity will feel familiar to the user's.

Pinterest's design of displaying each category accompanied by a large example image does a good job of reducing cognitive load for the user.

To look at the best way to give artists a way to showcase their shop's, I evaluated design solutions on Instagram, Shopify and Etsy. Shopify allows for a large image hero that has a beautiful, minimalist, and modern feel, which aligned well with my client's vision for this app.

It was essential to look closely at Etsy's shopping cart flow. The platform confronts various problems that arise when designing an e-commerce site that hosts many different sellers. Such as how to display items in a cart that are all being sold by different artists, and shipping from different locations. I look more closely at Etsy in the next section.

Most e-commerce sites do not feature a curated feed or deal with having multiple sellers. I focussed my competitive analysis on Etsy.

The layout for seller's individual shops is presented well. They allow for each seller to display their specialized policies through a simple and intuitive design.
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The shopping cart's information architecture is clear and well thought out. It doesn’t leave me with any unanswered questions when going through the checkout flow.

The apple app store reviews showed an overwhelming amount of responses about lack of accountability, in regards to both the app, and individual sellers.

On top of that reviews showed a general loss of trust among users. Items said to be handmade were actually cheaply manufactured in china. Items claiming to be silver or gold turned out to be cheap metals. As well, many reports of large corporations to be posing as small creators.

I was intrigued to see a filtering capability to specify shop location. I tested it out for Vancouver. At first glance it presented plenty of products, however on closer inspection the majority of "handmade" items appeared to be factory made with an unknown origin. With the exception of a few knitted hats the options for hand crafted items was highly limited.

I discovered that Etsy's business model has changed to allow reselling goods instead of exclusively hand crafted items. This makes the platform function more like eBay. This change pushed out many creators as they could no longer compete with prices of mass produced products. Thus leaving a hole in the market for an artist exclusive selling platform.
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Buyers noted that shipping prices were often far more expensive than the product itself. Affordable shipping goes hand in hand with buying local. Learning about this opportunity allowed me to begin brainstorming design solutions that could amplify the convenience and cost effectiveness that comes with buying local.

I identified two different personas who use this product. The Buyer (the target audience), and The Seller (the artist).

Let's look at the buyer, Helen Li.

Helen is 27, a young professional working in Vancouver. She keeps a tight budget but is willing to spend a little more money if she knows a product is well made, sustainable, and not supporting a billionaire owned business. Her archetype is the “everyman” meaning she’s motivated by respect, fairness, and community. She respects hard work and accountability.

She sees her favourite local shops going bankrupt every day and it is devastating. She wants to support local, but when it's time to buy gifts for say, Christmas, she doesn’t know what to search or who to look up. When she does search, she doesn’t find what she's looking for. If she does find something on Instagram, she doesn’t know how to go about contacting the artist. She's too busy and misses “story sales” because she’s at work.

She wants to give her money to the right hands and have cool stuff. She loves being able to say she bought something locally, and share her finds with others. She wants to make an impact and see her community grow, instead of supporting billionaire businesses. She doesn’t want to have to search for hours trying to find local artists on instagram.

Helen sees her friend’s post about how important it is to shop local, especially during the holidays. She sees friends with really cool niche clothes, jewelry, or art and they say they bought from someone on Instagram. She wants to keep up with her friends, look cool, and gain social validation.

Now the artist, Monica Muller

Monica is 35. She's an artist in Vancouver. She works a full time job serving while selling ceramics on the side. She is currently just selling on Instagram because of its flexibility and affordability. She hopes one day she can quit her job serving and sell her ceramics full time. But currently most of her sales come from mutual friends on instagram. She doesn’t have the revenue right now to justify a Shopify account or the time to sell at a craft market.

Shopify costs money and takes time. She was selling retail through a local gift shop for a while but they took a large cut of sales. The turn over was slow and inconsistent, which was difficult to manage while working full time. She likes the control she has on Instagram, but the algorithm only shows to her close circle, which doesn’t help her goals.

One day she wants to be full time ceramicist. She would need to expand her network. She wants to be able to market herself as a local artist. She is aware of the threat climate change presents, so she put a lot of thought into her packaging: sustainable only, which comes at a higher cost. She wants this to set her apart from wealthy corporations that are too greedy to do the same.

As an artist/creative archetype, she is motivated by self-expression and imagination. She has a few friends who have their own businesses and have been successful enough to make a living from it. She wants to be her own boss and control her sales, work flow, and make what she likes. She doesn’t want to feel pressured to make sales since she's so busy.

There were three top priority user stories identified.

Here I wanted to focus on the everyday Vancouverite, they're moving a lot. Whether it is reno-victions, gentrification, job instability, precarious hours, and unsustainable rental increases, it is a reality many are facing.  So you’ve just gutted, packed, and unpacked the entirety of your belongings, for the 6th time, in 6 years. But among all the chaos of moving, there is something oh so satisfying about a blank slate, a fresh start. Here we look at what it means to live in Vancouver. It means change. It means being part of a community. It means wanting to see your friends succeed. It means going out of your way to care about the environment, because you’re a part of something bigger than yourself. So you ride your bike across the city, through all your old neighbourhoods, to pick up a handmade vase from a local artist.

This was important to focus on because it highlighted a time when people are thinking about shopping the most and its impact on our earth and society. As a society we know that Christmas shopping has got out of control, we all feel it. Many who celebrate Christmas know the overwhelming guilt after the holidays, when you see all the garbage, the styrofoam packaging, the cheap plastic novelty gag gift, clothes you know were made in a sweatshop that poisons lakes with their dyes. You know it's all going to end up in a landfill. Yet we still crave to give something to our loved ones, it feels good. So many people are thinking about how to show their love, while causing the least amount of negative impact. People are finding balance by buying good quality items, with sustainable packaging, and supporting local businesses who are making the effort to care about the environment.

This story reminds us of the artist. The struggles of trying to do something different. The awkwardness of getting started. The world we live in, where everyone wants art, but many don’t believe artists deserve to be paid because “They're doing what they love.”

To start my sketching process I made notes of all the information I had gathered in my research

Once I had the details of my idea laid out I moved on and sketched the wireframes

From the wireframes I created a paper prototype to conduct internal testing

I converted my sketches into digital wireframes using Figma

I used my first iteration wireframes to conduct user testing.

I had 3 participants for user testing

What are their lifestyles, values, influences, outlooks on life?
‍What do they want from this product?
What is their preferred form of content?
What types of jobs do they work?
Their age, education, area they live?

Some tasks had a 100% success rate.


The search feature tested very well, no participants had difficulty navigating this task.
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There were no frustrations with shopping cart ease of use.
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Moving saved items to shopping cart proved good results as well.

Here's what needed improvement:

Participants struggled to find saved items under cart.
Their first try was always viewing the profile.
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The Artist Highlighter needed some work. One person noted “It felt clunky, I wish it was sexier.”
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‍There was difficulty distinguishing Artist Highlighter within the feed as well. They "[Wanted] bigger images"

I added the “Saved Items” button on profile to redirect to the cart to encourage learnability.
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On the Artist Highlighter:
I gave it a taupe background,
overlaid the bio to make it "sexier," and made images full sized.

Changes to the Artist Highlighter created a more distinguishable feature and 75% increased user engagement.
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The “Saved Items” button on profile reduced finding time from 1:33 minutes to 10 seconds.

This project posed many challenges in terms of informational architecture in which I  learned how valuable the use of negative space is to increase usability and reduce cognitive load. I got to participate in my first Design sprint. It was a great lesson facilitating out of the box creative thinking in a short time frame.

I’m happy with how this project turned out. It was really cool to see how much my design skills have improved since my first project. It was really neat to get to be part of creating an app for such an interesting concept that is so relevant for many peoples lifestyles. It's always great to be a part creating of something that will improve so many people’s lives.