My friends and I decided to try and challenge ourselves to see if we could build upon Kijiji’s current product to try and make it a safer experience for its users. We noticed a lot of our friends felt intimidated in participating in second hand online markets and we wondered if there were any opportunities for us to alleviate some of those pain points through design.
A large group of Kijiji users aged 24 and under are reluctant to use the platform for buying and selling because they feel intimidated by the meetup experience.
Remove unknown elements from buying & selling interactions, by providing users with additional information on user profiles and a review system for meetup locations, allowing users to make safer choices about where they are meeting strangers.
We updated the user profile screen to allow users to share more information about themselves. The user can now choose to display their pronouns, spoken languages and even transaction preferences. The user will also receive badges, awarded from other users for positive interactions.
We created a system for reviewing meetup locations, allowing users to quickly select positive aspects of a meetup location that other users can see. The data gathered will help remove unknown variables for users coming to a meetup location for the first time making them feel safer in unfamiliar areas.
Meetup location suggestions when applicable would quickly provide both buyers and sellers with a selected meetup spot at a halfway point between both parties. This allows users to be more mindful where the person they are meeting with is coming from and feel more confident about the location they choose to meet at.
We began our research by first reading through articles and forums online to get a general impression for how people felt about the second hand online market experience. To validate initial assumptions and gather more information, we conducted a survey which got over 100 responses.
We started the survey off by asking people about whether they’ve used online marketplaces in the past to buy items. Despite our initial assumptions we were surprised to see a large percentage of the under 24 group being active purchasers.
We also asked people if they’ve sold items in the past and found that a large percentage of the 24 and under group has, although still less than buying and that a much larger percentage have never sold.
43% of people under 24 felt scared, unsafe or intimidated at least once during a meetup with another person from an online marketplace. This validated some of our assumptions about discomforts our users had with these platforms.
Our survey confirmed that uncertainties about meetup locations were a main factor in making our users feel scared or unsafe.
In addition to removing uncertainties, our survey also confirmed that providing users with more information about the person they are meeting would make them feel safer throughout the experience.
We found that the majority of people preferred in-app communication for meetups. This helped us further understand the user journey and decisions made by people using online marketplaces. Users were also split fairly evenly between preferring mobile and desktop when using these platforms.
Finally we asked people if they thought online marketplaces could do more to improve safety for their users and an overwhelming majority said yes. This gave us further reason to believe there were some design opportunities we could find.
From the data we gathered, we created and empathy map and then began to model personas and user journeys to develop a better vision for the needs and pain points of our users.
We created two personas that we felt accurately modeled the needs and pain points that real people were experiencing. Both of these personas are for people under 24 and have unique scenarios that we would reference when designing later on.
With our personas created we created a set of journey maps to visualize our users pain points and flesh out additional opportunities for our prototype. We recognized that for both journey maps the low points where found during the meetup of the experience.
With our personas created we created a set of journey maps to visualize our users pain points and flesh out additional opportunities for our prototype. We recognized that for both journey maps the low points where found during the meetup of the experience.
With our strongest features selected we began to flesh out a rough user flow for how our users would interact with our solution. We broke it down into seven stages that we thought were key moments in the user experience.
Before beginning the greybox prototype, we needed to create a more concrete blue print for the screens we needed for the final design. We did this by creating a system map which incorporated a general user flow and the various stages of interaction.
Once the system map was created, we began to layout a greybox wireframe for the Kijiji app. We made sure to maintain the same design language in terms of layout and shape as the original Kijiji platform to ensure a seamless user experience. We created 22 screens with multiple iterations for certain stages of the flow. Building the prototype helped us further refine our solution and remove unnecessary features from previous brainstorming sessions
Paying close attention to Kijiji's brand guidelines we applied additional iconography, color, and typographical elements to create a high fidelity mockup.
With our high fidelity prototypes in place our next steps for this project would be to go through a couple rounds of user testing to verify our design choices. It would be really interesting to see which changes that we made resonated with people the most on a practical level. This project was a-lot of fun to work on and definetly helped me solidify and refine my product design process.