Company Overview
Errunds is a NYC-based startup that aims to grow local economies by connecting shoppers with bodegas in New York City/Brooklyn.
Challenge
When I first joined the startup, the team was still at its early stages of product development. After identifying a need in the market, the CEO had a grand vision for the product, which included features such as a community newsfeed, etc.
My role as the UX Designer was to get clear on our user needs and design the Minimum Viable Product (MVP) for the customer-facing side of the app.
MVP Goals:
User: Effortless onboarding and purchasing (sign up, product browsing, and checkout)
Business: Attain product-market fit with early customers to validate product need
Product: Include only urgent and important features and design for scalability
Who Are We Designing For?
To begin, I sat with my counterparts (another UX designer, our UI designer, and the CEO) to revisit our user personas to make sure we understood who we were designing for. While we had several user archetypes, we focused on understanding the paint points and goals of our early adopters.
Meet Abby.
Abby is described by friends as friendly and reserved; she enjoys taking walks in the park, reading, and archery. She works as a psychology professor at a city college about 35 minutes away from where she lives by metro; after work, she usually goes straight home.
During her workday, Abby has a 45 minute lunch break where she normally walks to the local Whole Foods to buy a salad or sandwich because it's where all the teachers go, and the only place she's familiar with in the area. She never packs lunch because she rarely has time to cook and enjoys the fresh air when she goes to pick up her food.
While the Whole Foods isn't too far away, the lines are usually quite long during her lunch break; by the time she gets back to the school, she only has about 10 minutes left to eat and enjoy her meal. She wishes there were closer and faster options that provide good quality and affordable meals.
Ideation
After getting clear on our user and the pain point we would address in our MVP, my team had a brainstorming session where we listed out all the potential features for the app. We then organized the features into an impact vs urgency matrix, which I thought was well-suited for determining which features to prioritize in our MVP. "Can users complete their goals without this feature?" "How will this feature affect usage?" are questions we considered when looking at urgency and impact.
User Story Mapping
After having a general idea of which features to include, we started thinking of our users journey. We recorded the actions they would take on sticky notes and displayed them sequentially. After mapping out and grouping the user journey for a new customer making a purchase (in blue), we organized the product features into the appropriate categories (in yellow).
Wireframing
Above are some of our early wireframes for our MVP.
We revisited the activities above several times since there was a lack of communication between our team and the engineering team; we discovered that features we thought wouldn't take too long to build would take much longer than we anticipated.
Final Design - Key Workflows
Sign up and Onboarding
At first, to keep out users who aren’t based in our offering area, we prompted users to visit the store and find the Errunds pin code to enter. We soon realized this approach was not ideal and could potentially lead to a low activation rate; instead, while brainstorming with our developers, we decided on utilizing a location-based approach that would permit anyone within a 10-mile radius of the neighborhood to enter the app.
Our onboarding screens display our key value propositions so users know what we're about and what we offer.
Product Browsing
We originally wanted to include search bar as it seemed an intuitive feature to have. However, the time it would take to build it out would push our launch date back by months. After careful consideration, we decided to push it to a later version.
The challenge here was to organize all the items in a way that would allow the users to easily find what they were looking for. We did some card-sorting exercises for the initial information architecture, then conducted usability tests on our prototypes to validate our design.
Checkout
Initially, we wanted to implement a “schedule-ahead” feature that would allow users to choose their pickup time; however, after careful consideration, we decided to postpone it, deeming it a "nice-to-have" feature rather than a "must-have" for our MVP.