Brief
My mission at Shpock
“Inspiring trust to our users”
Shpock is an online marketplace that uses a mobile and browser-based platform for private buying and selling of things around a certain area, in the UK but also in Germany and Austria.
I joined Shpock as a Senior Product Designer and joined the Trust squad. I worked alongside a Product Manager, A QA, an Android engineer, a iOs engineer, a tech lead, a data analyst and a scrum master. We worked on an Agile environment working into 2 weeks sprint cycle and we were all working remotely from different parts of the world.
Our mission was to bring trust to the platform which was attracting a lot of scammers, and our mission was to tackle this big problem and help each users to feel confident in using trust from the onboarding to the delivery.
Cancel a deal
One of my first project was to give the opportunity to the user to be able to cancel a deal.
The overall objective is to understand why the user (buyer) is using customer service to cancel a deal when he can cancel the deal without using customer service.
Our goals :
- Minimising the number of tickets open per deals.
- Create a better help center to allow the user to solve his problem without having to contact customer service.
- Determine how we can guide the user.
- Understand what are the reasons for the user to cancel the deal.
- Understand the circumstances of his cancellation.
User Interviews
The approach :
We ran one-to-one interviews with buyers profile based in UK but also look into customer service data. In total we completed :
- 4 interviews x 30 minutes – Users are using Faecbook MarketPlace, Ebay, Amazon and sometimes Shpock.
- Users were based in UK from 25 to 45 years old.
- Went through over 100 tickets
Our interviews were structured to answer the following questions :
- Which marketplaces do you use?
- How often do you use marketplaces?
- Where do you sell the most? Why?
- What do you usually sell?
- Have you ever had a bad experience on one of these platforms?
- Have you ever cancelled an order?
Reducing the number of tickets received by the customer service
Our mission was to help reduce the number of tickets received by Customer Service in proposing in solution where the user would be able to cancel the deal without contacting CS.
Ideation
From the ideation we came up with few ideas that could help us to reduce the number of tickets and to help our users to find the solution they need in order to solve the problem without contacting CS depending on the situation.
We realised that in some situations, the user would still contact the CS.
Possible solutions :
- Send an automated CS message that can be seen by buyer and seller.
- Add a confirmation screen to remind the user that he is cancelling and inform/educate him about the 24h and the 5 days before he get his refund back.
- Educate the user – ‘Cancel deal’ isn’t cancelling but requesting a cancellation where the seller has 24h to take action.
- Measuring – if the user is actually reading HC article.
- A call to action should be added in the HC articles.
Solution
When the user will go to ‘help’, depending on the status of the deal, some help center articles will be recommended to the user, where he will be able to find the answers to his problem, if he can’t find the answer to his problem he will be able to directly take action with the new component.
- The user will be able to cancel the deal
- The user will be able to seek for help —-> Contacting customer service.
As we saw that the main reason to contact the customer service was to cancel the deal, we are giving this opportunity at the finger of the user.
We’ve created a component that will be add in each Help Center articles.
Royal Mail Integration
The overall objective is to implement a Royal Mail option to offer a better delivery option that will bring trust to the buyers but also a better handling for the sellers to send their parcel.
Project goals :
- Create a smooth User Experience for both seller and buyer.
- Buyer should be able to track his order instead of waiting for a proof of shipping.
Approach
We ran one-to-one interviews with sellers profile based in UK to understand how they use delivery services when selling their items. Our first range of interviews has been conducted with individuals from 25-55 years old.
- 5 interviews x 30 minutes – PingPong interviews – Users are using Ebay, Facebook MarketPlace but haven’t used Shpock.
- They sold more than 5 items, Royal Mail is the service that they are using the most, but also other courier like Parcel2Go, ParcelHero, DPD or Hermes.
User interviews
We asked the user these questions:
- Where do you sell the most? Why?
- When was the last time you sold something? What did you sell last time?
- How was your experience with delivery services with your last item you sold?(anything unexpected or to mention?)
- Can you explain to me in your own words, your journey from when you listed the item to sending the item to the buyer?
- Can you talk me through the delivery process?
- Did you share the tracking number with the buyer? Why?
The outcomes:
- Users know about Royal Mail and feel confident to use it.
- Users used to go to the Post Office and not use the online services.
- Users feel confident when sharing tracking and proof of postage from Royal Mail.
Challenges
We went through few challenges during the integration of this project.
- It was not the domain of our squad
- A short deadline: one quarter
- The first initial user interviews showed us that our users are going to the Post Office and not using any online services. They are used to go to the Post Office for the convenience (close by, nice walk, they know which service to use…)
- Integrating with a corporate with contracts limitations.
- Not enough time to integrate the tracking option.
Wireframing + Design
Because of the time constraint, I had to wireframe and design high fidelity designs as fast as possible in order to test the flow in order to start the implementation.
I have conducted some user interviews but we also did a Beta Test with 100 of our users before releasing. We have recruited the users from our Facebook Shpock Group that we created to have an honest and direct feedbacks from our users.
User Testing
We organised 8 unmoderated user testing with 8 regular Shpock users using Royal Mail, aged 20–50, 6 females and 2 males,
all from the UK.
The overall goal was to validate the RM flow.
In addition, we wanted to find out if the user would understand what to do after they bought a label through our integrated service.
Why are we testing?
- Understand how the user reacts with the RM integrated service.
- Understand if the user will successfully buy a label and will know what they have to do next.
- Understand if the user understands what to do in 4 key screens : select weight and size, delivery services, your details and print label.
- To bring us more confidence for a full roll-out when we release.
Outcomes – Survey
We sent the survey to around 2000 Shpock users who successfully sent a parcel using our RM integration.
47 users responded.
Users found the Royal Mail flow straightforward, easy, simple and quicker.
They didn’t like about the prices, they find RM more expensive and some users had problems with the pricing that was incorrect.
Next steps
- Update the prices screen on the listing flow.
- Thinking about a discount, voucher to push more user to use RM?
- Give more informations about printing.
- Give more informations about Delivery office vs Post Office.
