Designing a Marketplace App
Harvest Cleaning is the parent company for a B2B Nursery Marketplace out of California called ClonePLG, previously Neighborhood Nursery. They provided a marketplace for Cannabis Nurserys to sell to business across the state of California
Role
UX/UI Designer
Tools
Miro
Figma
iOS Style Guide
Team
UX/UI Designer
Graphic Designer
Project Manager
Information Architect
Duration
12 weeks
How Do You Simplify a Marketplace App for Buyers
Harvest Cleaning currently only had a web portal, which didn't reflect the busy lifestyle of the clients they provided for, as well, the marketplace didn't allow for a variety of features that the client wanted to include to cater to his clientele.
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Challenges:
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Facilitate user flows for Vendors, Buyers, and Delivery, ensuring orders are tracked properly
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Include a Rating and Review system for Vendors and Buyers
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Provide a dashboard for Vendors to manage their sales and Buyers to manage restock/automatic orders
Solution
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To accommodate all the needs of this marketplace, we focused on making a web portal and app feature, basing the overall hierarchy off of similar products like AirBnB. We wanted to be sure that users could complete a list of actions that we defined during out discovery sessions, and worked through various user flows to outline the steps needed to complete them. From there came wireframing and branding, as we focused on a mobile first design.
Design Process
My team focused on
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Focusing on the needs for the different user profiles that would interact with the app
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Determining features that would benefit those users the most
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Creating User Flows to structure the interactions of the app
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Creating Wireframes to test the design assumptions
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A closed-ended, monitored session of usability testing.
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From there, we looked at what the branding would look like based off the clients direction and crafted high fidelity wireframes.
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We met our goal, and was able to deliver high quality wireframes to the development team, then focusing on providing feedback on functionality based on iOS's design framework.
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The major learning curve here was understanding iOS in mobile app design and applying the product-specific design system in line with those requirements.
What did the user need?
Strategy
With all the data we had gathered, my team started making plans and visualizations for our ideal solution.
This included:
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Listing desired features from each group
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Organizing those features with an Affinity Diagram
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Prioritizing features to determine an MVP.
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Using some card sorting to organize those features into pages
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So, so, so many user flows for each persona. And then more user flows to check alternative paths. And then a few more. We needed to be thorough!
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Design System ​
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To prove our assumptions to the client, I made prototypes to showcase flows based on the predetermined user flows.
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But of course, this wasn't every page that would be included on the site.
To save time, and clarify design handoff to the development team, we decided to work on what would turn into the design system for this product.
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We leaned on Apple's iOS Design kit, as well as AirBnB's visual language guides as we built this system.
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Outcomes
The client was incredibly satisfied with the final design for the iOS app, as well the final site.
I did have various additions that had to be included at the end of the process that slowed down development, as our discovery process with the vendor, we realized much later, excluding information that came into play later on. Thankfully, this information was additional and added to a project as needed.
