Equip’d is an effective and intuitive mobile application that is backed by user research, providing a solution to the company’s customer base expansion goals and knowledge base limitations
Experience It!
Equip’d is an effective and intuitive mobile application that is backed by user research, providing a solution to the company’s customer base expansion goals and knowledge base limitations
Experience It!Project Overview
The company undertook this project in hopes of being able to educate their customers ahead of time in order for them to buy, bid, and sell more easily. In turn, this will benefit the company by expanding their user base, providing education to customers, and making it easier for customers to participate in their auctions.
The goal for this project required the creation of a mobile application that would allow users to view equipment information and specs based on the PIN, and show users the current value ranges of the equipment based on comparables for that piece of equipment.
For this project, my roles included user research, user flows, wireframing, visual design, interactive prototyping, and usability testing.
Design Process
Research & Discovery
Looking to understand the user and their experience, I started my research off by conducting a user survey. The goal was to gain quantitative data, since I wanted to know Who, What, When, Where, How often, How many, etc. in addition to qualitative data, since I wanted to know How and Why as well. So, by asking demographic questions as well as personal experience questions I was able to get a better idea of who the user really is.
What I discovered was that they were men, by a long shot. Specifically men between the ages of 28-85, that were self-employed. Typically listing occupations like Dairyman, Farmer, Construction owner, etc. They tended to value hard work, loyalty, and discipline, while finding changing weather, poor economy times, and technology challenging. Lastly, they are easily influenced by family, friends, neighbors, and radio.
Since information on heavy equipment in this fashion is such a niche market, there weren’t really any similar enough products out there to perform a proper competitive analysis. However, I did look at sites that dealt with heavy equipment and values.
Sites like Ritchie Brothers Auctioneers, CAT, and Kelley Blue Book. Ritchie Brothers is a heavy equipment auction platform. It is a site where you can bid and buy the heavy equipment they have listed, with limited information. What I liked about their app, was that the information was simple, well organized, and the information was easy to find.
CAT on the other hand, makes and sells their own line of heavy equipment only. What I liked about their app was the color scheme, the layout of the information card, allowing you to see more through a CTA without having all the information in front of you, giving you more of a synopsis up front.
Lastly, Kelly Blue Book is well known, it gives you the value of your vehicle based on your location, it also breaks the range down based on condition and that’s what I like the most about it. With heavy equipment the value range is much wider, ranging from 50 to 100 thousand for example, that’s literally double the starting value, so to be able to break that range down based on the condition of the equipment, it would allow the user to dial in on the value more easily.
I needed to find ideas for the project based on the research, ideas that I thought would have the most effective impact for the product. The two ideas that I liked the most was Kelley Blue Book’s price range indicator, which would help satisfy the second requirement of showing users the current value ranges of the equipment, breaking it down based on the price to help users dial in on where exactly the equipment falls on that range. Secondly, was Citi Card’s credit card scanning function, which would help satisfy the first requirement of allowing users to view equipment information and specs based on the PIN, using this feature as a more convenient way to enter the PIN.
Information Architecture
Based on the audience analysis I created personas to represent the user type and give us a picture of who the user really is. Bill was the first user persona for this project, he’s a 66 year old dairyman from Ada, Oklahoma, who works on his dairy with his family. Bill has so much going on running the dairy that he needs a more convenient way to access information, especially on necessary equipment. Bill gets very overwhelmed by the time and effort it takes to find out information on equipment at auctions. So Bill represents my user type that this product will be built for.
Click on the picture to view persona.
I started the design process by creating user stories. Since user stories require a problem statement of who, what and why. I started with.. “Bill needs to look up information on a loader so that he can see if it has enough power to complete the job.” After creating the problem statement, I was able to break it down into relevant tasks, or what Bill needs to be able to do in order to accomplish the tasks that alleviate his frustrations. They key though, was to make sure that they align with the business requirements, always making sure to keep the MVP in mind.
These stories can be broken down even further into sub-actions or steps, the steps that Bill would take to complete the task through the whole process. So based on the last story listed, if Bill were needing to look up the value range for a piece of equipment, Bill would first need to open the app, then create an account, then login to his account, then he needs to enter the equipment PIN, and so forth. These stories are very helpful when creating the user flow.
The user flow that I created maps the pathways a user takes to complete a task. By using my user stories to map the user flow, I can see what screens I need to create. I want to be able to keep my MVP in mind here again, and keep it simple and efficient, especially since I learned my target audience can be older and are not very tech savvy.
You can see that aside from the onboarding process, which is pretty standard, that once you login you can choose to either scan the PIN or manually enter the PIN. Regardless of which option you choose, it's followed by a screen that asks you if the PIN entered or scanned is correct, eliminating the frustration of looking up the wrong PIN or entering it incorrectly. After that, it gives you options to view more details, access value range information, or look at saved searches so you can refer back to them when you go to bid.
Sketching is a great way to get the ideas down on paper and really see what it looks like, luckily with sketching, editing is very easy and fast. So I sketched out some ideas incorporating the ideas I pulled from my generative research. I wanted to follow my user flow while still keeping the design simple and easy to understand. Once I had the ideas down, I created final sketches that I will then turn into digital forms.
I just used my final sketches and turned them into a paper prototype to give me a quick and easy way to see how the product will look and function before I spend time on the digital version.
My first digital version of the sketches and the layout for the design were my low fidelity wireframes. They were very basic, no color or any visual design elements. They basically look like a polished version of my final sketches. I didn’t go through a ton of iterations on it, it stayed pretty simple and straightforward.
Before I could test my product, I need to create a version of my prototype that testers could understand in order to use it effectively, so I added UI elements like color and photos, creating what would probably be considered mid-fidelity.
Low Fidelity Wireframes
Medium Fidelity Wireframes
Testers were given two tasks to complete that directly related to the business requirements as well as two open ended questions and two rating questions. The first task asked the testers to login and find the estimated value for the given PIN (Product Identification Number) by scanning it. The second task asked testers to login in order to find out where the specs are located after manually entering the loader’s PIN, then next to find the other items that have been saved to their account.
The tasks were followed by two open ended questions asking about the overall impression of the product and what features they liked or disliked and why. It also asked what testers thought would improve the experience. After answering the questions, testers were asked to rate the overall appearance of the product on a scale from 1 to 10, also to rate how easy they thought the product was to use.
Check out the full test conducted on Maze.co!
Overall Experiences
Through multiple rounds of testing and iterations, results improved dramatically. By the final round, two thirds of testers completed the first task directly, as in following the set pathway, while the other one third of testers completed the task indirectly. On the second task, 100 percent of the testers completed the tasks directly. The appearance rating averaged a 8.8, while the ease of use rating averaged a 9.3 out of 10. The keywords used for testers overall impression feedback included, useful, convenient, clean, easy to navigate, organized, pretty intuitive, and appealing. Testing results improved after resolving pain points through iteration overall.
Interactive Prototype
Final Thoughts
Successes & Learning Opportunities
The testing results only improved after the pain points were addressed and resolved. Between rounds of testing, I made iterations to the product based on feedback. Testers were initially confused because they misunderstood expectations and lacked background knowledge. To remedy this, I included background information on equipment/auctions and how it all works beforehand and gave clearer context for how testing works and what kind of feedback was expected. Also testers did not recognize that the price range button was in fact a button. So, I remedied this, by making the button larger and placing it in a more uniform place, that was more consistent with the entire app.
Some of the positive feedback I received for the product, highlighted several key features. Testers really liked the overall concept & layout of the equipment specific information, they loved the convenience of being able to scan the PIN, and they liked that the estimated value range was broken down based on the condition of the equipment itself.
Next Steps
The product itself is still not complete, there are still a few more steps. First, there needs to be more testing to address any pain points within the product. Second, there still needs to be a higher fidelity version, to create a more aesthetically pleasing user interface. Lastly, a plan needs to be created to prep for front-end development in order to launch the product.
Conclusions
I created an effective and intuitive mobile application that is backed by user research, providing a solution to the company’s customer base expansion goals and knowledge base limitations. Also meeting the outlined business requirements, by allowing users to view equipment information and specs based on the PIN, and showing users the current value ranges of the equipment based on comparables for that piece of equipment.
In the end I learned so much, all about the auction industry and heavy equipment. All about the different customers and types of users involved. But, most importantly, how to effectively understand and address their needs and concerns.