Providing online shoppers with a secure and reliable refurbished electronics marketplace.
BACKGROUND
Alchemistt is an e-commerce platform that sells refurbished secondhand electronics, mainly MacBook and iPhone and provides extensive post-sales services. The client wants to redesign the experience that can instill trust in consumers in Hong Kong in the secondhand marketplace.
TIMELINE
Jul - Oct 2020
TYPE
Website Design
OUTCOME
• 80% increment in user satisfaction rate
• 58% of users are more likely to try out the 7 days trial feature
• 83% are more receptive to other Alchemistt offers
MY ROLE
User Research, UX & UI Design, Usability Testing, Client Management & Presentation
TEAM
1 UX Researcher, 2 UX Designer (me), 1 Design Lead
01 / BACKGROUND
Overview
• Hong Kongers love electronic gadgets. Inspired by having the trendiest devices, Hong Kongers are always changing the latest device.
• This creates excessive products that have a high resale value, the owners sell them on P2P marketplaces and forums but the process takes days or even weeks. Sellers are annoyed by the inefficient manual process. A study conducted by GOV.HK shows that 47% of the participants said they will buy a new phone every 1-1.5 years.
• Our job is to create an intuitive way to guide users throughout the trade-in process and make sure they can successfully trade-in their devices and fully experience the benefits of the program.
• This creates excessive products that have a high resale value, the owners sell them on P2P marketplaces and forums but the process takes days or even weeks. Sellers are annoyed by the inefficient manual process. A study conducted by GOV.HK shows that 47% of the participants said they will buy a new phone every 1-1.5 years.
• Our job is to create an intuitive way to guide users throughout the trade-in process and make sure they can successfully trade-in their devices and fully experience the benefits of the program.
Challenge
• Based on the client's hypothesis, start up owners and SMEs are more likely to purchase secondhand products because they have a lean budget and are likely to re-sell their electronics to have better cashflow.
• There is no standard grading of a secondhand device, sellers set a price based on their expectations and they go through a tedious negotiation process with the buyers to agree on the final offer. As the sellers have no subjective assessment of the value of their electronics, they often find the counteroffer to fall short of their expectations.
Problem
• Potential consumers are doubtful of quality of products in secondhand market
• Current website doesn't look professional and doesn't convey creditability
• Potential customers don't understand the benefits of shopping at Alchemistt
Solution
• Instill trust for potential customers and differentiate from local computer mall
• Strategically highlight Alchemistt' key offerings and quality assurance prominently
• Provides one-stop seamless customer service journey
02 / RESEARCH
PRIMARY RESEARCH
Understanding consumer behaviors for secondhand electronics
Understanding consumer behaviors for secondhand electronics
Phone interviews with 18 start-up owners and 63 survey respondees.
Insight:
• 60% have tried using secondhand laptops for their teams
• 45% are more likely to purchase secondhand gadgets for work
• >80% are willing to buy again depending on the product feedback and conditions
The main critical barriers for the secondhand market are security and privacy issues, and also the bad perception of post-service. Users fear the lack of support and maintenance and are worried about post-sales performance issues.
"I struggle to find a trusted dealer for second-hand devices, a service provider who can provide a certificate or transparency behind the scene."
- Interview participant, 27, Start-Up Founder
Problem Statement
How might we create a trustworthy, reliable & professional online shopping experience for people who are looking for valuable secondhand electronics?
CUSTOMER JOURNEY
Improving the user journey by bringing simplicity and transparency via
Improving the user journey by bringing simplicity and transparency via
- Reducing Information overload:
A consulting approach to help business owners map out their business needs in device purchase decision-making;
A consulting approach to help business owners map out their business needs in device purchase decision-making;
- Building trustworthiness:
Introduce DEKRA, a professional refurbish certification to create trust;
Introduce DEKRA, a professional refurbish certification to create trust;
- Better information architecture:
Simple side-by-side comparisons for efficient decision-making;
Simple side-by-side comparisons for efficient decision-making;
03 / DESIGN
BEFORE VS AFTER
Rebrand & instill trust in consumers
Rebrand & instill trust in consumers
The landing page transformed to be a lot more simplistic, showing key logos to convey trust, which was one of the main problems users encountered when it comes to purchasing second-hand electronics. The overall color tone has also changed from bright purple to a more serious tone that mimics professional and high-end electronic sellers, with real images of products to instill trust.
Before
After
BEFORE VS AFTER
Highlight key offerings and competitive analysis table
Highlight key offerings and competitive analysis table
- Better categorization of key benefits by reducing text and using symbols to represent
- Translating the warranty benefits from a user's perspective, easier to understand
- Translating the warranty benefits from a user's perspective, easier to understand
Before
After
04 / SOLUTION
The key to Alchemistt's success lies in changing the negative perception of trade-in by creating trust, efficiency, and delight.
Trade-in in less than 3 minutes
Creating a well guided and effortless onboarding journey to minimize the natural resistance in selling personal items. Users complete a trade-in in less than 3 minutes, and they get rewarded with digital vouchers to redeem immediately.
Manage expectation through a well-guided process
By managing the users’ expectations on the trade-in value through well-guided device grading process and transparent grading criteria information, removing the doubt on evaluation.
Amplify the user delight
Showing user the social benefit they created through trading in their devices. Users see real-time data on the environmental saving from the trade-in activities they did and they can easily invite friends and families to team together, passing the positive impact on to more people.
05 / IMPACT
Usability Testing
Conducted with 12 participants, who have all shopped online for tech devices, and tested 5 scenarios for users to test on both Alchemistt current website and the revamped version we designed.
The objective of the test:
• To uncover any problems and confusing content
• To examine the perception of the trustworthiness of the site to enhance conversion performance
The testing results show that...
• users are likely to continue to browse if they feel the website can be trusted and look professional
• 67% of users have difficulty finding what a premium warranty entails on the current Alchemistt site
• Users want more concise information regarding quality certificate
What I've learned
🗣 Understand client constraints and communicate
During the ideation process, my team and I came up with a list of solutions that can solve the problem to instill more trust for the potential customers, however the client prefers to remain with its existing offerings and doesn't have capacity to offer more services. If we understood this constraint earlier, we would be focusing more on how to highlight and lead to users to wanting those key offerings.
🗂 Define the design system as soon as possible
As this project, I collaborated with other designers and we all worked on the same Figma document, it is very important to create components, define the UI library, including buttons, colours and text style which can quicken the workflow, especially if there's any design that needs to be changed.
