Etsy Customised: UXDi Project 3 Case Study
Team: On this project I worked with fellow General Assembly UXDi students Sebastian Swainsbury, Chesca Mutuc and Pamela Wang.
Duration: 2 weeks.
Tools and Methods Used: User Research, Google Forms (survey), Design Studio, Paper Prototyping, Omnigraffle (flows and sitemap), Sketch (initial wireframes and high fidelity wires), Marvel App, User Testing, Keynote.
The Brief
The brief was to create a feature on Etsy.com where buyers could request a custom-made item and sellers could respond to that request in the form of bids.
Etsy already has a custom order function available with some shops, but it is hidden and not explained at all. When clicking on the button, all users are presented with is a free text field in a pop-up. Our goal was to create a full custom-made section on the site.
The Strategy
A first glance the brief seemed fairly straightforward, but once we started researching Etsy, through business analysis and user research, we discovered a key insight from users. What we found is that for many people, Etsy is not the same as it once was. Especially for early-adopters, they felt it had strayed too far from its original philosophy of being a marketplace to buy, make and sell handmade, unique goods. Many of them had become part of the Etsy community to get away from buying mass-produced stuff, but now they felt that was harder and harder to reconcile with the site’s incredible growth.
This ‘David turning into Goliath’ insight (analogy coined by Wired, read the article here) became our strategic focus.
User Research
We created a survey which was sent to Etsy buyers and sellers, promoted on Twitter, LinkedIn and on Etsy Facebook groups.
We conducted face-to-face, telephone and Skype interviews with sellers and buyers and these conversations, as well as the answers we received from the survey, led to the insight explained above. Penny, an Etsy buyer we spoke with said:
I want to know that there’s a woman in Kent or somewhere, not a factory, making my product.
For many people, Etsy stands, or stood, for something and it was crucial that we reconnected our users back to that.
We also found that with over 30 million listings on the site at any one time, discoverability was a huge issue for both buyers and sellers. Buyers were getting lost in the mass of stuff for sale, and sellers were not getting noticed.
The good news was that when people were looking for unique and custom-made items they immediately thought of Etsy over their competitors. Some people we spoke to had purchased specific custom-made items on Etsy before from sellers and spoke of the benefits of this, but all said that the process was unclear. When asked if they would be interested in a custom-made feature almost 79% of buyers said yes, and over 91% of sellers agreed. So there is clearly a demand for this new addition to the site.
Market Research
For the competitive analysis we looked at competitors which were marketplaces for independent businesses selling crafty, unique things such as Folksy and Not On The High Street, as well as eBay and People Per Hour for their bidding systems. We also looked at Pinterest as Etsy and Pinterest are so intertwined, especially for sellers.
Folksy really stood out as a growing competitor to Etsy, firmly rooted in that crafty, handmade world. Interestingly, we didn’t get back much about Folksy from our survey when asked if this was a website people use, however I can certainly see that changing over the next couple of years. I’ve also recently heard about start up Love Crafts, and would like to further study them in the future.
Key takeaways from the research to keep in mind for our design proposal were:
- As an initial test case, and to avoid spamming buyers with bids, only allow sellers with high ratings to participate.
- Design a filtering system which could hold and surface a large amount of information in a non-overwhelming way.
- Ensure a simple way for buyers and sellers to communicate. We really liked the ‘clarification board’ on People Per Hour and decided to incorporate a Q&A section into the bid board to facilitate any conversations around the requests. This was in addition to the usual ‘contact buyer/ seller’ functionality.
Persona Creation
From all of the user research we developed our key personas (representations of our target audience). Having personas was important as it meant we could check all of our design decisions back to them, ensuring we were addressing their core needs.
Understanding Our Personas
To understand Jess and Jay’s pain points, we undertook a task analysis by observing users carrying out a task (in this case, trying to order a custom-made item on Etsy and setting up a listing) and developed user journeys. The below is a buyer task analysis and journey — an analogue illustration!
The zoomed in areas show the pain points around the filtering (so many results!), not being able to navigate to a custom-made section and the communication ping-pong between sellers and buyers.
We also created problem scenarios to further pin down the key issues we needed to solve for. The below is a scenario for Jess:
Feature Prioritisation
Once we had all of the above we could start brainstorming and prioritising features:
The site map was also created after this process.
Design Studio
To generate multiple solutions, fast, we conducted a design studio. This involved all sketching as many iterations of the key interfaces in a set amount of time, before coming together to review the designs and jointly sketching out each interface based on everyone’s input. This is a powerful and super efficient way of designers collaborating to get interesting and quick results.
Testing and Iterations
Once we had the key screens we could test the paper prototype. This was helpful in showing us what screens were missing as well. We conducted two rounds of paper prototype testing.
Two of the most important screens were the custom-made request form for the buyers and the bidding form for the sellers. These ended up quite complex during the design studio and testing made us realise that we needed to simplify these and make them easier to use.
We looked at design patterns for forms on the UI Patterns website and tried out a fill in the blanks pattern to make the form friendly and more intuitive. We found that there didn’t need to be so many prompts with this kind of design as the copy made it easier to understand what was needed.
We also learned:
- The terminology of a ‘shipping date’ for buyers was confusing and meant they would need to work backward from when they actually wanted the item by, so this was changed to ‘date needed’.
- The category fields in the buyer’s form should autopopulate based on what the buyer types in i.e. if she wants a blue knitted teddy bear then the category and subcategory should be automatically filled in to ‘Toys and Games’ and ‘Soft Toys’. The buyer can change it if she wants, but she shouldn’t have to try and figure out what categories her product fits in to.
Wireframes and Mock-Ups
After the second paper iteration we moved into wireframing with Sketch and conducted another round of testing.
Then we were able to move onto high fidelity mock-ups. Hi-fi mockups are incredibly useful as they mirror what the final design will look like.
Proposal: Introducing Etsy Customised
Our proposal for Etsy was to create Etsy Customised, a feature which we believed would connect buyers looking for that ‘one-of-a-kind’ item directly with the talented makers who could create it for them. In essence, this would be a return to Etsy’s handmade, unique, community roots which users love so much.
Key Features of Etsy Customised:
- A buyer request form for the buyer to clearly detail all the information pertaining to her request. This included uploading inspiration photos, a deadline, a budget and being able to choose the location of her maker. Buyers could also set how many bids they wanted to receive (to avoid an overwhelming amount) and select the request to be sent to their favourite shops and/ or specific makers.
- Similarly, the seller bid response form included a function to upload any sketches, confirm the budget and deadline and an area for the seller to ‘pitch’.
- Dashboards for both buyer and seller to manage requests, bids current, won and lost and any messages and notifications. These messages would be private but there was also a:
- Public Q&A section on the request listing so that any seller interested could view previous questions from other people, as well as the buyer’s responses.
- A maker’s gallery for inspiration and also to browse and get to know makers. A buyer could begin the request process straight from this section if they wanted.
- If there were no makers who could create the buyer’s request, then she would be shown other sellers from the wider Etsy site who were making similar items for her to contact instead.
The Future
If we had more time on this project I’d love to explore the following:
- Introduce a quick bid process for sellers if what they are bidding on is a very small item and doesn’t require such a robust form.
- Integrate more of a ‘story’ side to Etsy Customised, so shop profiles and video testimonials.
- Revisit the test case of only allowing sellers with high ratings to apply and figure out a more future-proof solve for a) not discriminating against new sellers and b) still avoiding any kind of bid spamming or unqualified sellers.
- Integrate Pinterest into Etsy Customised, and perhaps explore something cool with buyable pins.
- Develop a chat feature between buyer and maker for super fast communication.
Prototype and Presentation
The prototype was developed in Marvel app and can be found here: https://marvelapp.com/3911c9g
