Loot Gear
Mobile Shopping for Gamers
Role and Project Goal
My Goal in creating and designing this app was to create a way for gamers to easily order equipment. This included easier to use filtering, organized vendors and a smother and more compact navigation experience.
Challenges I ran Into
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Filling out the inventory for the prototype
Foundational Research
I began by interviewing a number of people in my personal network who identified as gamers in order to find the pain points. Not only did I test it on various age groups regarding gamers but also some who I knew had vision trouble. I also designed personas based around the characteristics I wanted to design it for. I created an empathy map and the issues came down to users of other shopping apps seeing repeats of venders for the same product on the shopping screens as well as issues with telling the quality and state of the product. They also had issues with the amount of information that would be listed in the titles, making the products harder to differentiate.
Ideation
I gave it some though and decided to design an app that utilized a filter in a much cleaner interface than most of the competitors. After selecting the product of interest the app would then sort the vendors of the product by price while also showing a rating system for the products quality based on a quality expectation that would be done on the back end. I sketched up a number of low-fidelity prototypes until I had a mobile layout that I felt would be easy to navigate with the listed criteria.
Design Research & Insights
I then created the prototype in Figma using one of my personas who needed to order a mouse. I then ran a usability test to see how it felt to actual users. The biggest issue I ran into from the feedback was the way the filter was set up. Before it was set up after signing in to send the user directly to the filter. After the test it became apparent this needed to be set up as an option for the user, but by default they wanted to be able to see all options first. I also noticed my users would hesitate after completing a transaction due to the button saying continue. After asking follow up questions as to why they hesitated, a number of them mentioned that it was unclear where the button would take them once they tapped it.
Solutions from Feedback
As far as improvements, some of the solutions I implemented are as follows.
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Creating a traditional mobile filter at the top of the app.
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Having the app default to showing all products.
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Changing the continue button on the check out confirmation page to a "browse more" button