Offkeeper UX design case study

Case Study

Process and tools

UX

Offkeeper: Redefining the way to discover discount offers.

Connecting the gap between the customers who seek those offers but miss those because there is no place to get to know about all the offers.

Project Duration

August - December, 2019

TEAM

Mafruhur Rahman Faruqi (Product Designer)
One Full-stack and one Front-end developer were responsible for development

MY ROLE

Product Designer, Manager

Overview

Aug 2019. We wanted to reduce information gap between discount offers and interested shoppers who need it the most.

OBJECTIVE

Research, strategize and design an end-to-end mobile app based platform to help people get to know about all necessary discounts they can shop, with a focus on increasing conversion rates by 50% for business.

Approach & deliverables

At August 2019, I formed a team with a full-stack developer and a front-end developer to build the project. My tasks was to design the end-to-end experience of posting an offer from business-end and browsing offers from customer-end.

The Offkeeper minimum viable product (MVP) needed to be delivered by the end of October in time for lunch in November.

Process

The process for this project includes the follwing:

RESEARCH

Context Study
User Pain Points
Competitive Audit

Analysis

Problem Statement
Use Cases
Executive Summery

IDEATION

Feature Narrative
Design Principles
Journey Map UX Flow

Design

Lo-fi Digital Wireframe
Interactive Prototype

Feedback

Stakeholder Feedback
Field Testing
Designer Critique

Handoff

Iterations
Assets hand-off to Eng.

Research

CONTEXT STUDY

There are 2,345 brands in Bangladesh, including lifestyle, tourism, electronics, educational institute, apparel, and cosmetics. Each brand offers discounts three to four times a year, depending on the occasion, season, and business type. So it's apparent that discount offers work in every kind of business.
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But are the people who need the discounts most getting the opportunity to grab the offers? Well, it's not.

The traditional storefront ad for "50% OFF" is no more effective in this information era. Facebook post boosting also overwhelmed the users, and they decided to "unfollow" those brands who make notice in their newsfeed every day. Here it's also safe to say that the Facebook ads for offers are also being avoided.

Users don't look at the brand's respective websites either for discounts because there are a lot of them, and it's insane to browse 40-80 websites to see if there are any discount offers.

The result? Both parties are suffering from this information gap. The customers are suffering because they don't know which brands are offering the discounts on products they need. On the other hand, businesses have to wait for a more extended period to clear their shelves of products they want to sell quickly, resulting loss of millions of taka per day.

USER PAIN POINTS

Following are the core problems this product aims to solve, largely aligned with those about customers.

1

There is no place where users find all the discount offers in one single place. Users are busy in the information age and can't try to go here and there for that.

2

Browsing individual brands' websites or Facebook pages is daunting. The worse, if users need an offer for a specific class of products, like resorts, they need to browse 40-50 websites.

3

Users aren't ready financially when they discover offers. It needs cash to buy something, even at discounts. And users often aren't willing to buy because of the little money in their pocket.

4

No way to get reminders about the offer they are following. So, the user gets frustrated seeing the offer they kept eye is over.

5

Business owners must wait a long time to clear discounted product shelves and stack new ones.

6

There is no effective medium to communicate with the customers who are willing to buy immediately.

Analysis

Problem statement

Users need a platform to find the news of all the discount offers they seek, reminding them about those because they miss the offers they need most.

Use cases

"I need offers because I don't have money to buy that in the total price."

"During the offer, I could make gifts to my friends and family."

"I can reserve a better resort for vacation."

"I try to buy things in offers because they are the same as the total price.

Executive Summary

Offkeeper will inform users about offers and send them reminders. This app will affect users who need offers to buy goods or services by allowing them to skip Facebook searches, website searches, or organic storefront searches.
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We will measure the effectiveness by tracking the number of users interacting with every offer post.

Ideation

Competitive Audit

We gathered some ideas on how existing platforms work to reduce this problem. We looked into how the competitors position them in the market and what values they provide to their users. This audit gave us an upper hand in designing a superior experience while delivering value.

Design principles

Respecting Human Nature

The app should respect the fundamental human factors. I took care of cases where user can make mistakes, easy of scanning and intuitive interfaces.

Designed for genuine experience

I designed the merchant side of the app so that only established brands can post the offers. It's because users don't trust offers from unpopular brands.

Clarity is paramount

I implemented feedback loop for every interactions users make and avoided the feature that I could not make it clear.

Feature Narrative

The core features of the Offkeeper are to effectively communicate the offer news and help to find the best deal for the users. Besides browsing all the offers, the users can filter them in multiple ways. There are short descriptions of the values we intend to deliver to the users and businesses.

Offer in need, offer indeed- It's where users get to know all offers around them. Users can filter the offers by category and brand. It includes the details about the offers, including the opening and closing date, the offer-like buy-one-get-one, or fractional discount category.

Only real discounts- We feature genuine offers. We filtered genuinely strategically on a few points. The Offkeeper system only allows offers from established brands that use POS and standard pricing.

Out of sight, out of mind- Offkeeper enables users to follow a specific offer till its deadline. On following, users will get notifications and keep track of the offers. The followers also get messages from businesses about updates businesses want to notify about.

Add as a favorite brand- Offers from users' favorite brands matter to them. By adding the brands to "Favorites," they can get priority by getting early offers notifications.

Pin category- to get notifications about all offers posted in that category. It gives the users peace of mind by assuring them about offers they care about.

Offer in need, offer indeed- It's where users get to know all offers around them. Users can filter the offers by category and brand. It includes the details about the offers, including the opening and closing date, the offer-like buy-one-get-one, or fractional discount category.

Seeing is believing- In the real-time LIVE analytics dashboard for every offer posted, a business can see how its offer is going on. How much people liked, followed, and viewed your offer along with the trend chart displaying pick time.

Location-targeted offers- Businesses can post offers targeting a specific location so that the users of that reason get the notifications. It's especially effective for different business branches to expand their brand awareness and profit.

Followup to keep up- Upon posting an offer, businesses can send follow-up messages about updates on the offers. It includes notices that are important for the customers who are following the offer.

Journey map UX flow

Based on the feature narratives, I designed the core user flows. I focused on the core paths a user may follow to reach the desired goal. The flows primarily include:1. Browsing offers, including the category and brand filtering,
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2. Follow the offers to get reminders,
3. follow brands to receive notification of future offers,
4. Pin category to get alert,
5. Brand account creation,
6. Brand posting an offer, and
7. Brand sending the follow-up messages.