“Everyone has the power to help”
- Mateo Palacio, Co-Founder & Director
It all began with a simple value, giving back. At Charity Bay, they believe in a world where every person has the power to help. The reality is that in Australia alone, over 8.3 Million people chose not to help just because of their financial constraints. The root cause they are trying to change is the general misconception that money is needed to make a change.
The Brief
My role in this brief was to simplify, eliminate steps and eliminate friction for buyers coming to CharityBay looking for items, as well as merge all the experience and messaging into the primary objective: social impact.
What’s involved?
The project scope
End to end project from research to prototyping.
Time Frame
14 days from scratch to the outcome.
Role
UX researcher, remote user testing, and High fidelity wireframing.
Activities
Stakeholder management, interviews, user testing, wireframing and prototyping, and final steps after.
Justin’s Design Approach
Discover
Primary and Secondary research is extremely important to my process to truly understand the people we’re solving a problem for.
Define
From there, analysing Insights, discovering Opportunities within their pain points, developing Personas and How might we statements to inform my early prototyping decisions.
Develop
Ideate and Evaluate any current and new problems that arise from understanding our target audience. Creating Concept Posters to layout how to begin with Low Fidelity wireframing.
Deliver
Finally, any good UX process utilises Usability testing and feedback as an integral part of validating our solution. Service blueprints are set in place as we continually test and test our Medium to High fidelity prototypes for a deliverable product for our clients.
Challenges & Initial Findings
Challenges
Highlighting Charity Bay’s point of difference to users?
Why are there so few users utilising this amazing website?
Warming users up to the concept of bidding/ auctioning for second-hand items.
Explaining how buying or donating second-hand good’s benefits the user.
Initial findings
Websites like gumtree have up to 7 million unique visitors every month, the market is out there.
Users have never heard of CharityBay before, the website is currently largely Melbourne-based.
This is not your typical online shop and go experience, users and sellers will want to donate higher for a good cause
The highlight of each transaction is its cause for good, our research shows that most people donate because it makes them feel good.
The Three Objectives
Make discovering listings easier.
Improve buyer education by highlighting the impact of purchases.
Make purchasing easier.
How do we start?
Research Methods
Desktop research
35 survey responses
10 one on one interviews
22 prototype usability tests across low-high fidelity
70%
people that we surveyed and interviewed liked CharityBay’s concept
Buyers
For it to be adopted by the buyers, the site has to be secure (76%) and easy to use (72%)
7 out of 10
people were initially unclear of what CharityBay does - messaging needs improving
10 out of 10
identified navigation issues that are adding friction to the buying process and must be addressed
Problem-solving with design
Testing real users
We conducted 6 separate one-on-one virtual interviews, averaging an hour each to find out what they thought about our low fidelity prototype.
Feedback
Users were asked a series of questions to validate the layout placement, visual consideration, and feature architecture.
Pain points
It all starts on a bumpy road. We received a ton of honest feedback on how we can improve the experience for our buying users, from the wording, image placement, and whether or not the flow felt intuitive or not.
Creating Danielle to understand the user’s journey.
Danielle is the culmination and collection of our research, she represents our target audiences needs, wants and concerns when approaching the website. Her pain points inform our early prototyping solutions.
Her problem statement:
Danielle knows that a post-pandemic society can be better than the one that preceded it, and she wants to make it a reality. She donates mostly when she hears about a need or issue on social media. She likes buying second-hand goods as she's conscious about money and enjoys finding unique items
Using journey mapping to highlight Danielle’s paint points
Her scenario
Danielle’s buyer experience is of vital importance to analyse. It’s important to understand her doubts, her concerns and really take her experience in mind. Only then can we truly begin to understand what type of solutions would be suitable for her.
Her journey
In detail, this describes the Danielle’s of the world and how they perceive their experience. Her pain points and her emotions throughout her buyer experience mould our discovery process and inform our early prototyping solutions.
Every decision that we make in this project is to improve the experience for the “Danielle’s of the world”.
Low Fidelity Prototype
User Testing: Round 1
“Delivery and payment did not feel intuitive - felt miss worded” - Jerry
Constructive Feedback
I made a big leap from the existing website that lacked overall consistency with imagery, message, and purpose. Our users were very honest with their feedback and commented the following:
6/6 of our users liked seeing the impact of their money on the items page they chose.
5/6 thought that the layout was more meaningful than the current website but still needs more work
6/6 like the overall direction we’re headed in but would like to see how imagery and colour play an impactful role in the higher fidelity.
“I like seeing examples of where the money is going, it builds credibility.” - Elen
Critical Feedback
5/6 users did not understand the purpose of the website from looking at the homepage
6/6 Thought the map on the listings page was still too big
4/6 user Still did not understand what "reserved price" actually meant
6/6 did not like the charity information on the top of the items page
and finally, 3/6 of users thought there were too many categories within the dashboard
“Right now, it doesn’t talk about what’s unique - its more that it does what everyone else is doing” - Chris
The Next Step
The map size on the listings page is a problem that needs to be addressed, half our users want it bigger but half don’t want to see it at all. I need to find a solution that keeps all users happy.
Reserve pricing is crucial to Charity Bay’s bidding system, if some users don’t understand the terminology used, then the website ceases to be a seamless experience.
With filler text and a lack of imagery, the purpose of our website is still too ambiguous, I need to add more impactful headlines and statements that address this issue.
Our medium-fidelity needs to solve these pain points.
Medium-Fidelity Prototype
User Testing: Round 2
“The message that it's for charity is clear, without being overbearing” - Sam
This is what I tested
Upon our user’s second review of our improved site I asked the following prompting questions:
After briefly browsing this site's revised home page for the first time, can you clearly understand the purpose of this organisation?
What do you like or dislike about the way information is organised?
What do you think about the map feature on the right-hand side of the page? would you use it when searching for an item? does it's positioning help? Too big? Too small? Distracting?
Is the website expressing the reserve price in the simplest way possible?
On a scale of 0-10, how did you find the experience of donating for an item? Did it feel intuitive or complex?
“Everything you want is essentially here on the product page.” - Mel
This is what I found
4/5 users thought the messaging and purpose was clear on the home page.
4/5 mentioned they liked the GIFs, animations, and videos.
4/5 users thought the layout of the listings page had improved from the first iteration.
5/5 users told us that the layout of the product page has all the information you need about the listing
Lastly, 4/5 users mentioned the dashboard is a good idea and is straight forward
“Coming from the previous test, this version makes reserve prices much more clear and understandable”
“The dashboard looks pretty good, it's pretty self-explanatory.” - Damien
This is what I had to solve
I received overwhelmingly positive feedback from all of our users after our mid-fidelity testing. Furthermore, meeting up with our client after a mid-way presentation further verified that our clients loved the direction we were heading. Our last step to improve from here entailed:
Alignment issues, a clean interface means a more inviting and useable platform.
Further cut down the filter categories, users felt they were necessary but was too crowded near the search bar.
The map being on the page was still too invasive for some, I need to find a way to conceal it but not get rid of it.
Add imagery, a more complete looking website will give our final users and our clients the best understanding of what the final product should look like, should they ever implement our changes.
High Fidelity Prototype
A user-validated wireframe that fulfills the 3 objectives we set out to solve.
My high fidelity work
How I solved problems through design.
Popular Items & Pricing Bar
The objective I chose to tackle for this project was a seamless and user-considered buying experience through my listings page. It was important that sorting the page by most popular items and pricing was easily accessible, as these were the two most popular filters. I solved this by creating an easy button to filter by popularity and a pricing bar that goes up and down in increments of $5.00, as research shows that users spend a bit of time trying to land on a number ending in “0”.
Interactive Map
To solve the problem of half the users wanting a full sized map for locating items and those who saw very little use in it, I chose to create a hybrid solution by creating a button that allowed a pop-up interactive map to appear. This solves a major pain point for users because it was concealed for those who put the location as a low priority filter.
More Filters
The option to have three tiers of filters allows for the user to target products more easily, as demonstrated through the ‘more filters’ button. This addresses the pain points of a confusing search function that was frustrating.
Reserve Price Labels
To address the 50% of users who weren’t familiar with the term “reserve pricing”, I devised a way to clearly indicate that an item was either instantly buyable or not, through clear labeling on items listed. Solving this challenge was crucial to the core function of Charity Bay’s bidding/auction payment system.
Did we accomplish what we set out to do?
We made discovering listings easier.
We improved buyer education by highlighting the impact of purchases.
We made purchasing easier.
Let’s have a chat about this project over coffee
Clarity
Charitybay puts so much effort into creating a safe space where people can get declutter their long-lost items and bring forth a new front for good, but their efforts are undervalued evident through a customer base that still needs growing.
Importance
One of the most important takeaways from this project was learning just how users think and show them the value of this service, breaking any old stigma’s where being charitable means going out of your way.
Understanding
We understood best of all that people are creatures of habit and that adopting this new framework of giving and taking (not for your own profit) is somehow burdensome. My team and I focused on the experience that tried to make the “feel good” aspect of giving as seamless as possible for you.
Thank you Charity Bay.
Prototype ready
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Prototype ready •
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