Millennials, the generation most immersed in the internet, prefer to shop online the most. Instagram has made a series of moves to become a shopping hub, forcing companies to adapt their digital strategies. Instagram says that 80% of the app's users follow a business. Instagram is making it a lot simpler for people to buy things they come across in their feed. In spite of this, many people are skeptical about purchasing items on Instagram, especially from vendors that they don’t trust or have never met. Research shows that generally, the consumer's purchase decision is to buy the most preferred brand. For my Udacity UX Nanodegree Program, I chose to design an Instagram vendor review application.

The aim of this study is to design a mobile app to establish trust between buyers and instagram vendors and also help these buyers make better and informed decisions when purchasing items on instagram..

I recruited 10 participants (friends, colleagues and friends of friends). These participants are people who frequently shop online, especially Instagram and mostly buy shoes, clothes, bags, food etc. because;

• Active buyers on Instagram will be more likely to use an app to check and give comments about an Instagram vendor

• Active Instagram buyers are the desired user persona

I asked them about their needs, pain points, experiences and how they give feedback on their experiences after buying items from Instagram vendors. I identified opportunities to build a product with a focus on what buyers look for in an instagram vendor before they decide to buy from them.

• Many buyers are skeptical about buying items from Instagram vendors because they have had bad experiences with them.

• Some of the buyers have also seen and heard bad reports on instagram vendors.

• Users are focused on checking comments on the instagram vendor’s page before they buy from them. Although some users consider other factors as equally important.

• Many users talk to other people about their good or bad experiences with instagram vendors.

• Users recommend vendors if they have good experiences and discourage other people from buying from vendors they had bad experiences with.

• Most of the users tell other people about their bad experiences and don’t share good experiences until they are asked.

• Many users don’t trust instagram vendors and believe that some of the comments on their pages are fake.

At the beginning of my design process I started by highlighting themes and opportunities based on the interview with the users.

I was able to gather some feature ideas and used the value vs complexity quadrant to come up with some feature priorities. I had a brainstorming session with a developer to understand how each of the features can be prioritized from the development point of view. The yellow sticky notes attached to the green, orange and pink sticvky notes were the features I decided to work with.

I mapped out the users’ steps to see how I could simplify their journey to help them reach their most important goals with the product. This made it easier for e to see the navigational structure of the app and zoom in on where I can bring delight to the users.

I created sketches for the designs using the crazy-8 sketch to run my ideation session.

I explored a lot of designs on Mobbin and went on to gather screenshots of products that might serve as inspiration

We wanted to make sure that our visual considerations amongst other things make sense. We created wireframes to visualize the major flows we had created. This helped us, not just in rethinking our approach and some design decisions

To get a sense of the flow and test the experience, an interactive prototype was created for the high fidelity wireframes Here is the link to the app

The purpose of the prototype was to:

• Test whether the wireframes and design flow was helping the users achieve their goal

• Assess whether interactions are clear and flow is linear

• Test and fine-tune basic animations and transitions

I organized a remote usability test with 10 users via lookback. The link to the test was shared with them and users were asked to record their screen and talk out loud when using the design prototype.

Here are the test insights from the testing:

• Users got confused when they wanted to rate/review a vendor. They weren’t sure if they could only review a vendor and not rate them or if they have to rate and review a vendor.

• Some users wanted to only rate a vendor and not review. They realized that the app doesn’t allow them to do one of the actions.

• The major difficulty users had was that they didn’t know that they had to click on rate before they can write a review.

Based on the feedback gathered from the usability test, I improved the designs.

Some trade-offs were made in order to focus on the users achieving their goal; these tradeoffs were made because of the scope of the project;

• Users cannot login or create account

• Users cannot filter the list of Instagram vendors

• The app does not recommend top vendors to users based on search history

Here is the final prototype of the design:

https://www.figma.com/proto/bVxFp2jvQVynliwkQKPwIG/Instagram-vendor-review-app-version-2?node-id=160%3A419&viewport=489%2C610%2C0.3648315668106079&scaling=min-zoom

Users are now able to choose an instagram vendor to shop from without being scared of getting scammed because they can see reviews and ratings from other buyers. They can also give feedback on their experiences with an instagram vendor.

This project has given me an opportunity to learn about designing for the users and using insights from research to drive design decisions. This project has shaped my design thinking process. If I had to do this project over again, I would want to expand the scope of the project to include additional features. I would also do additional interviews with a wider audience in order to gather deeper insights. For example, I would have liked to organize twitter polls to reach more people who actively shop on instagram.