Thrifty
Mobile Application
Figma
5 Days
Design Challenge
How would you design a bargaining experience on a mobile and web e-commerce platform selling second-hand goods?
The Design Process
Above process has been employed while designing the required user experience. This includes all the basic steps of the whole process and can be integrated with the design thinking as follows.
Requirements
For anyone looking to sell second-hand goods, allowing potential buyers to negotiate the price is a great way to help close the sales. Buyers can save a few bucks, and sellers get to offload their stuff. However, price negotiation has its pros and cons, and there are unique characteristics to selling second-hand items. How would you design this experience and make it as smooth and frictionless as possible so that sellers and buyers can transact with ease?
Research
Purchasing items that have been someone else's property before is referred to as secondhand shopping. According to research already done on the factors that influence why people choose to shop secondhand, there are four main reasons why people do so:
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fashion motivation
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economic motivation
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recreational motivation
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critical motivation.
Economic motivation is defined as customers' price consciousness, their ability to negotiate and look for lower prices, and their tendency to stay away from the mainstream market in quest of more affordable goods. Economic motivations include "pricing," "price orientation," "value for money," "bargain hunting/seeking," and "critical motivation.
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The term "bargain hunting" refers to the practice of clients haggling for a lower price. Even though it appears to be the fun part of shopping, finding deals is driven by price. Refers to a customer's desire to use negotiating to their advantage to purchase a goods for less money.
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A negotiation entails a number of price adjustments from both buyers and sellers. When both parties accept a suggested price, a deal is made. This procedure is supported by an automated bargaining system, which first decides whether to accept an offer and then issues pricing in accordance with updates from both sides.
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Leveraging the research insights, user experience related to bargaining in Thrifty e commerce platform has been designed as follows.
Current State Map
Through interviewing 3 individuals how the steps related to the process of bargaining is happening usually is depicted in the Current Status Map. The contents provide the basic information on how things are done now, what could be the problems the users are facing and what are the points at which problems are occurred.
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It is assumed that normally once a potential buyer found an ideal product for his/her search, a message is sent to the seller inquiring about the product. If the potential buyer wants to bargain, he/she will start a conversation on bargaining and if both parties; buyer and seller agree to a certain price the transaction would be proceed. If not, the potential buyer has to pay the listed price or not purchase the item.
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This current state map provides the inputs into next step of design process through aiding to identify the user groups involved in the scenario.
Personas Integrated with Empathy Maps
Referring to the current state map two main user groups can be identified as Buyer and Seller. Following proto personas are high level representation of identified user groups including their user group, demographic information, their pain points, and their goals and needs. Apart from that empathy maps have been integrated to the personas including sections for cognition (What they think & feel), perception (What they hear & see) and behavior (What they say & do) of the identified user groups.
Pain Points and Goals & Needs
Considering the above identified pain points, goals and needs following points will be addressed through this user experience designing.
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Even though the buyers need items at a lower price they are not that much comfortable in asking to reduce the price which may lead them to quit the idea of purchasing the item or pay higher price for the item. This would be addressed by adding a feature to the platform which enable potential buyer to offer a price that he/she is willing to pay for particular item. Through normalizing bargaining within the platform will encourage the buyers to negotiate with the sellers and purchase the items they need at a lower price.
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Then the pain point of sellers where they get unreasonable price offers from the potential buyers when bargaining; that could be a result of buyers not having clear idea on in which price range they should be in when negotiating with the seller or just trying to get the item for a lower price as possible without being reasonable. To address this, potential buyers will only be able to offer the prices more than the declared minimum offer price by the seller.
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Moreover, to enhance the user experience, when bargaining the buyers and sellers only have to enter the offering of counter offering prices as other features like accepting, declining and counter offering are provided within the platform. Other than that, most probable questions would be already presented for the buyers to ask from sellers. On the other hand, sellers would be abled to assign answers to the most probable answers when they are listing the products therefore, they don’t have to repeat the answering same question from multiple potential buyers. Ultimately these will reduce the time being spent when negotiating which is a main pain point of both the user groups.
Solution Blueprint
Considering the insights obtained from the above steps of the UX design process following blueprint for the solution is built.
User Journey Map
Referring to the above information in each section high level user journey map is created for the flow of Bargaining for an item, from both buyer’s and seller’s perspectives.
Wireframing
The following process indicates how the initial idea begins with its low fidelity wireframes, then moves to mockups, and finally to the high-fidelity prototype. In this simplified version, it will be able to see how I the requirements are approached in improving the user experience while bargaining on the platform.
Design System
Prototyping
Protype of the solution can be viewed by clicking here.
Once the potential buyer finds out the ideal product from their search or their requirement, he/she can view the product details as on the usual e commerce platform. Since the Thrifty is specifically focused on facilitating the users with a better bargaining powers potential buyers have the ability make an offer for the product there itself on the product details page by clicking the Offer Your Price button. Also, by providing navigation menu item as offers it is expected to keep the users engaged with the bargaining, they are carrying on making their experience more pleasant.
Once the Offer Your Price is clicked, the potential buyer is facilitated to provide their offering price under a condition which is declared by the seller who listed the item stating the minimum price he/she is expecting for the item. This would address the pain point of both parties; buyers tend to offer unreasonable prices due to lack of knowledge regarding the price range in which they should be in while bargaining. Also, it is stated that Your offer is not a payment to avoid confusion from the buyer’s side.
A tag will be appeared then to indicate the status of the bargaining process in order to keep the potential buyer aware about what’s happening and soon after messaging option will appear including the offer that potential buyer has sent.
If the seller sends a counteroffer as a reply for the offer that potential buyer has made, it can be accepted, declined or counteroffer can be made by using provided options. Also, the potential buyer can make an another offer regardless of the previous one or to get information from the seller he/she can either tap on provided options without getting bothered to type those or type the message that is wished to be shared with or without attachments.
If the counteroffer from the seller is accepted by the potential buyer, he/she is encouraged to buy the item right away or add the item to the cart by providing the options in order to make the transaction happen within lesser time.
Add to Cart and Buy Now options will be continuously there on relevant chat when one user; either seller or buyer has been accepted an offer to encourage the proceeding with the transaction. Here Make an offer option is no longer encourage there fore it has been made similar to other options, however it is provided in case the relevant part needs to make an offer. Through including Hurry up & make it yours as an indicator, it is expected to remind that transaction should be proceed further quickly as both users; buyer and seller have come at a same price otherwise the chance of obtaining the item might be missed.
Solution Testing
Prototype of the bargaining experience in relation to Thrifty – the second-hand good selling platform has been tested with three individuals.
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According to their feedback the whole experience was convenience and understandable. It encourages them to bargaining without being hesitating or feeling shy since it is provided withing the setup of the platform which make the bargaining to be seen as an obvious behavior of the buyers. Making the buyer aware about the price range they should be in when bargaining is highly admired considering the seller side since it prevents the potential buyers from offering unreasonable prices which lead to frustrations and time wastage. Not having to type the questions is seen as a better feature as it reduces the time while negotiating. However, it was pointed out that it could be an issue if there was no option to type the messages that users want to send other than provided options. The tag which indicates the statues of the bargaining was admired as it gives the sense on what is happening with the bargaining.
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However, it is expected that make the tag looks clickable, and make the buyer enable to open the relevant chat through the tag and it was identified as a point to be improved.
References
https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/abstract/document/941356
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0969698919301742
https://www.jstor.org/stable/1818090#metadata_info_tab_contents
https://www.interaction-design.org/literature
Tier 1 User Experience Designer by Mr.Rasika Mahindasiri
